Film Review: THE RENTAL (2020): Mumbled Mid-Thirties Malaise Does Not a Lean Slasher Make

The Rental Review

The Rental (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Dave Franco, and starring Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White, Toby Huss, Anthony Molinari, and Chase Barker.

Romantic jealousy and eroding trust make fertile ground for the paranoia of horror narratives, but only if they’re correctly tilled. The Rental, Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut, has all the conditions for such a horrific harvest but squanders them in lackluster banality. The result is a beautiful getaway with gorgeous scenery, but an itinerary that’s so trying and tedious you’re left counting down the hours ‘til you can go home.

Thirtysomething tech-world co-workers Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (Sheila Vand) decide they’re due a vacation after securing funding for their next big project. Together with Charlie’s wife Michelle (Alison Brie) and his little brother-slash-Mina’s boyfriend Josh (Jeremy Allen White), the two couples journey out to a rental property on the Oregon coast for a weekend of hiking, hot-tubbing, and drug-addled camaraderie.

Tensions in the group are shaky from the outset: Charlie is worried about Josh’s life trajectory, and that he’ll fall into the throes of petty crime once again; Josh fears he’s not living up to either Charlie’s or Mina’s expectations, and sooner or later they’ll both abandon him; Josh and Michelle create a feedback loop of suspicion regarding Charlie and Mina’s “partnership”; and Mina is creeped out by the off-putting racist proclivities of the rental property’s caretaker (Toby Huss). These fears coalesce into murky clouds of doubt and disenfranchisement, and the group’s dynamics soon begin to crumble.

Oh, and someone’s spying on the group through hidden cameras and is actively pitting them against each other.

Of course, that aspect doesn’t significantly play into The Rental until partway through its third act. At that point it shifts into slasher gear in a cruelly controlled way, fulfilling the audience’s bloodlust they were initially promised while ultimately leaving them dangling in a sparse void of ambiguity. Franco takes the horror of an unknowable killer and overlays it onto the homogenized setting of the rental space, creating a sort of modern-day riff on the paranoid home invasion and stalker archetypes (particularly the classic Black Christmas) in the process. But again, The Rental is unconcerned with these graphic thrills until very late in the game, and it’s very easy to tune out of it before then.

Besides endless teases via cutaway POVs and an itch of general dread, the film is too wrapped up in its own sense of mid-life malaise to concern itself with richer horrific excavations. This could be on account of the film’s co-writer/co-producer and mumblecore heavy-hitter Joe Swanberg, who douses the script in disaffected drama that’d be better suited in its own separate project. While that approach offers very brief bursts of authenticity that offer to some whiff of commentary on our alienated age, it mostly evokes – whether purposefully or not – a lack of effort and interest on the filmmakers’ part. And the muffled, vocal fry-addled deliveries by the actors doesn’t help much, either – a constraint against which Stevens’ gruff charm and Vand’s stoic determinism (a nice carryover from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) can only do so much.

All of that adversely affects the attempts Franco and Swanberg make at sociopolitical analysis, wherein any potential at a further critique of American racism and xenophobia is drowned out. Instead, that whole discussion – and one of Mina’s character arcs – is relegated to nothing but set dressing, in favor of pushing petty in-fighting to the forefront. Which itself is also a disappointing fact, since there has been a long tradition of films that effectively harvested our anxiety of crumbling relationships and portrayed them as tangible horrors. But The Rental is not that, and thus renders its few strengths – the exciting ending, Sprenger’s gorgeous cinematography, and Bensi and Jurriaans’ throwback score – as disparate parts, never quite matching the others yet not fully strong enough to stand on their own.

Though not without its occasional allures, The Rental plays like an amateur attention grab via genre filmmaking – a low-effort ride of the “elevated horror” wave. Save your money and your days off and invest in something gnarlier and better worth your time.

Listing flagged as a total bore.

Rating: 4/10

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