Mark Reviews Movies: THE RENTAL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 23, 2020

Dave Franco's directorial debut is a convincing relationship drama that gradually reveals something sinister happening behind the scenes. Until the third act, the screenplay for The Rental, written by Franco and Joe Swanberg, seems pretty straightforward, watching as a pair of couples are slowly torn apart by pent-up emotions and one night of bad, drug-fueled choices. After that, the story re-aligns itself as a paranoid thriller founded upon guilt and self-preservation. In that third act, though, the film throws us for one loop, before completely re-defining everything we've seen through yet another startling revelation.

It mostly pays off, because the screenwriters and the actors give us believable, if not entirely sympathetic, characters to go through this twisty wringer. By the time that first unexpected development in the third act unfolds, we have a solid idea how each of these characters will act and why. Once the second shock happens, we realize how they have—through mistakes and flaws and misplaced trust—put themselves and each other in a situation in which there might be no hope.

As for the couples, there's the pairing of Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie), who are married, while Mina (Sheila Vand), Charlie's business partner who has become a dear friend, and Josh (Jeremy Allen White), Charlie's previously troublemaking brother, are in a serious, committed relationship. Charlie and Mina have had some recent and potentially game-changing success, so before work becomes too busy, they plan a couples' weekend away at a fancy house on the coast, provided by an online rental service.

Almost immediately, there's plenty of tension. Charlie and Mina are incredibly close—a fact that hasn't escaped their respective romantic partners. Michelle puts on a confident face, but she half-jokingly reveals some jealousy to Josh.

For his part, Josh confides in his sister-in-law, expressing doubt that he's a good match for Mina, who's smarter and more accomplished than him. "She's the total package," Charlie says, describing his co-worker to his wife in bed before the trip, expressing his own doubts that his younger brother is worthy of Mina's attention and affection. Charlie is so unaware of his words and to whom he's saying them that maybe, we suspect, Michelle's jealousy isn't undeserved.

At the rental house, there's more tension, not only because of the character and relationship dynamics, but also because of Taylor (Toby Huss), the guy handling the booking and taking care of the house on behalf of his absent brother. The man gives off an insulated, judgmental vibe. Part of that comes from the knowledge that he turned down a request from Mina, whose surname denotes her Middle Eastern roots, to rent the place but accepted Charlie's. Mina doesn't trust Taylor before she meets him, and as the weekend unfolds, with Taylor's tendency to come into the house without notice, her suspicions grow. Subjective shots of an unseen figure watching the four with heavy breaths give us reason to believe he's up to no good.

The first significant turn within the story involves a night of partying on drugs, a hot tub, a late-night shower, and a betrayal. All of it is grounded in the established conflicts, unspoken or understated by the characters, of these various, interconnected relationships. It's heightened by the knowledge that someone, just out of view and unknown to these characters, is watching, and the resulting guilt and desire to keep a major secret are elevated when someone notices a tiny camera, clandestinely placed in the showerhead. There is, to the knowledge of the individuals involved in this act of unfaithfulness, only one suspect, but the two have to keep camera and the suspicion a secret, lest their own secret be revealed.

There's a cunning but believable sense of escalation to this story. We understand these characters and their guiding principles (eventually learning that one of them might be so egotistical that it almost appears like a lack of principles). We think we have a grip on the game that Franco and Swanberg are playing, as the faithless characters' secret becomes more and more difficult to hide. Those little suspicions, established firmly in the first act, grow, and the sense of paranoia spreads as everyone learns just enough information about what the house's caretaker might be doing.

That leads to the dual climax, which proceeds in one direction, observing how almost all of the characters are willing to dismiss responsibility and morality for their own ends, before dismissing that. The film finally arrives at a conventional, if unconventionally bleak, turn into straight-up terror.

That final move isn't quite as convincing as the rest of this story, although Franco presents the fallout with such skillful dread and relentlessness that it almost doesn't matter. It is, perhaps, best to look at that film's final descent into brutality as a clever kind of meta joke. We often question why characters in a horror movie are so quick to separate when there's real strength in numbers. Here's a horror tale that spends the first hour or so giving the characters every reason to break up (as couples and as individuals within a perilous situation), and then we watch, helpless, as someone's plan to divide and conquer unfolds.

More to the point, there's something quite daring in the seeming randomness of this ultimate development and the fates of these characters. Franco and Swanberg prepare us for something, to be sure, but The Rental is so persuasive, as a relationship drama and in its rise toward a paranoid thriller, that we don't see this particular result coming. That's the real horror, isn't it? You never see it coming.

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