Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, abounds in atmosphere and distinctively honors the individual rhythms of each member of its ensemble cast. However, a well-calibrated sense of “wrongness,” generated by tensions existing among the characters and intensified by a beautiful but forbidding setting, is eventually revealed to be scarier than Franco and co-screenwriter Joe Swanberg’s ultimate explanation for what’s awry.
The Rental is two films at once: a seriocomic study of how sex undermines the ambitions of talented thirtysomethings, in the key of Swanberg’s films as a director, and a well-staged but ordinary slasher movie that has virtually nothing subtextually to do with what preceded it. It’s as if Franco hits an “off” switch halfway through the film and starts all over again.
The Rental opens on one of its most suggestive shots. Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (Sheila Vand) are hunched over a computer at work, reading about a lovely cliffside Airbnb, with a huge, open house and a hot tub on the porch and woods to lend the setting a sense of privacy. The body language between Charlie and Mina is so casually intimate that we take them for a couple, until Charlie’s brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), stops by to pick Mina up.
Josh and Mina are dating, and Mina and Charlie are partners in an unspecified startup that appears to be on the verge of success. Charlie is actually married to Michelle (Alison Brie), who has a way of isolating herself from the group over the course of their weekend vacation along the Pacific Ocean, seemingly—and perhaps subconsciously—determined to physicalize her constant sense of feeling left out, and of being upstaged in Charlie’s affections by Mina. (Charlie has a habit of complimenting Mina, to Michelle, a little too enthusiastically.)
These scenes have a nervy subtlety, pivoting on the familiar Swanbergian theme of young-ish creatives who’re unsure as to whether to try to stay young by taking vaguely defined risks or embrace the comforts of yuppie conformity. And the Airbnb reflects the characters’ aspirations and their accompanying uncertainty about those aspirations back to them. The place is luxurious and comfortable but lonely; it’s so big that it encourages the group to splinter into new arrangements, allowing buried grudges and insecurities to surface.
Charlie and Josh have an unresolved, macho brotherly rivalry, and Charlie resents ne’er-do-well Josh’s inexplicable coupling with Mina. Pointedly, we also learn that Josh has a history of violence. Threatening to bring this inchoate bitterness and hostility to a head is the renter of the Airbnb, Taylor (Toby Huss), who seems to enter the building at his own discretion and has a habit of saying creepy things to the women, especially to Mina, who’s of Middle Eastern descent and believes Taylor is racist for ignoring her own request for the Airbnb.
Franco allows this wealth of backstory to arise naturally, and he has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock, in the wake of careless or mean-spirited comments, and as a precursor to rationalizing reckless actions. The film’s first half concerns the terror of revealing your true emotional hand at the expense of chaos, and this terror is afforded a literal horror-movie symbol when two of the characters, in the wake of a very reckless action, discover that someone has outfitted the Airbnb with cameras, including one in a showerhead. We’re primed to suspect Taylor, who’s so conspicuously odd that you’ll probably think he’s being presented as a red herring. And we’re also led to wonder if Mina’s heightened sensitivity to perceived discriminatory slights is in itself a cause of violence—a startling idea for a 21st-century horror film that’s broached and quickly abandoned by the filmmakers.
When he reveals the film’s true menace, Franco squanders the psychosexual, generational, and political dynamics that he’s spent the better part of his running time establishing. The intention is probably to show that the squabbles of people’s lives mean existentially little in the face of death. In reality, though, it feels as if Franco is using horror-movie tropes—as ancient as the masked brute stalking foggy woods—in order to get out of a corner, relieving himself of the chore of dramatizing a group’s reorientation in the midst of several catastrophes. It’s as if we were watching a tense episode of Swanberg’s Easy only to change the channel halfway through to settle on an unusually proficient Friday the 13th sequel.
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