The Rental is the cinematic equivalent of beige paint. Its highest ambition is tasteful restraint; it exists to disappear into the background. A week after watching it, you could come back to it and get fifteen or twenty minutes in before you remembered that you’d seen it before.
There’s a certain kind of stereotypical indie feature–talky and centered on the mildly dysfunctional relationships of a glossily good-looking upper-middle-class cast–that haunts Dave Franco’s directorial debut. Maybe “haunted” is the wrong word. It’s like that template died and was autopsied by a thousand critics, and then Franco tried to reanimate it with the jolt from the thriller genre. Unfortunately, its new life never rises above the shambling, and the stitches and the bolts in the neck still show.
It feels like the film Franco really wanted to make, and could possibly have made well, is the one that was dead on the table; he just didn’t know how to bring it back without the electricity, and then he didn’t know how to keep it from petering out.
The film follows the ill-advised weekend getaway of successful Charlie (Dan Stevens); Josh (Jeremy Allen White), his underemployed screw-up brother; empathetic Michelle (Alison Brie), Charlie’s wife; and Mina Mohammadi (Sheila Vand), Charlie’s coworker and Josh’s girlfriend, a touch isolated on account of being the only person of color in the group. It takes the audience approximately seven seconds to deduce that Charlie and Mina are either having an affair or on the verge of having an affair and approximately three subsequent seconds to work out that Charlie is a self-centered dick. (Dan Stevens seems to seek out roles where his handsomeness serves as a bait-and-switch, an interesting self-aware tendency that ought to be rewarded with better material.) The conflicts destined to be relevant to the plot are all heavily sign-posted; we talk about early stages of a film “setting the table” or “getting the pieces in place,” because that’s necessary work, but The Rental does the equivalent of pointing out a gravy boat to make sure you know it’s there and picking up a bishop to loudly explain that it moves diagonally. Got that?
The four book a beautiful coastal property for the weekend. The house looks perfect, but on their second day there, Mina and Charlie discover that there are hidden cameras installed in the shower-heads. Charlie has (not especially convincing) reasons for why they shouldn’t call the police, Mina (very limply) resists this but also has (not especially convincing) reasons for why they shouldn’t just get the fuck out. Instead, they opt for the most self-evidently bad idea on the table–say nothing to Josh and Michelle, but ambush the property manager about it in a confrontation that can clearly go nowhere. (To the movie’s credit, this at least constitutes the best and subtlest deployment of one of its chess pieces: Mina has an established pattern of impulsively calling out injustice where she finds it. It’s well-foreshadowed, even if doing it in this context is the kind of misstep that makes people yell at the screen.) Unsurprisingly, things get worse from here.
Not all the thriller elements are badly handled. Franco does a decent, if often too hamfisted, job establishing the characters’ conflicting priorities and temperaments. This adds some nicely organic conflict that can erupt once the plot really starts cooking. Certain scares are well-done. Alison Brie’s characterization of Michelle–a woman whose tight smiles aren’t a disguise but a choice made by someone who genuinely wants to do the right thing and who can’t shut off her conscience–gets some nice layers. The setup stage also highlights Toby Huss as Taylor, the property manager, and Huss gives an especially strong and plausibly ambiguous performance–threatening in some lights, mundane in others.
Nevertheless, as NerdintheBasement noted, the majority of the movie’s heart and talent lies in the tense slice-of-unpleasant-life segments that deal with things like “great, thanks for getting too high last night to go on our planned hike this morning” and “I can’t admit it, but I’m constantly low-key pissed that the brother I look down on landed the woman I’m obsessed with.” When it gets into thriller- and horror-style tensions, it isn’t as convincing or as well-observed.
The unfortunate truth is that the parts of the movie that work are largely cancelled out by the parts that don’t–the significance gets sucked out of the realism once the bodies start piling up in generic slash-and-kills, and the handful of successful thriller bits don’t work as well when they’re actually less tense than the relationships. The result isn’t a successful genre hybrid, it’s just something that’s neither fish nor fowl, and it leaves you suspecting that the director’s talents and interests were on an opposite pole from his commercial ambitions.
The Rental is streaming on Netflix.