Skip: “The Rental” (2020)
This post is going to explain why you should skip watching “The Rental”, a “horror” movie about renting a place for the weekend from a web site (such as AirBNB), the feature directorial debut of Dave Franco (also, written by Dave Franco and Joe Swanberg).
First, watch this trailer:
It looks like an exciting horror movie starring Alison Brie, right?
(I’m going to dive into some spoilers here, so bail now if you want to watch it for yourself for some reason first.)
The movie spends the first hour just being this vaguely moody drama about these two couples, joined by the fact that the two dudes are brothers. (And surprise - one of the brothers is an absolute slacker and the other is some kind of creative genius. Who would have guessed a movie with weird pacing issues with rely on such a cliche family dynamic to create “tension” and help drive the plot?)
Stuff unfolds very slowly, building to the “successful” brother (Dan Stevens) cheating on Alison Brie with his brother’s (Jeremy Allen White) girlfriend (Sheila Vand) (who also, basically unnecessarily, happens to be the business partner of Mr. Success - a quick rewrite that movies the opening scene out of their work place and into an apartment, and some general sense that they’re into each other for social reasons would have made this less cliché (so many clichés). Sheila Vand quickly realizes that they were surreptitiously recorded having sex and then she and Dan Stevens start trying to figure out how they’re going to prevent the owner of the rental from revealing to Alison Brie and Jeremy Allen White that they were unfaithful.
Remember, we’re in a movie … a horror movie that from the trailer looks actually exciting! But the secret is, the horror movie elements seen in the trailer are all from about the last 5 minutes of the movie.
So they scheme about what they’re going to do. And then Alison Brie calls the owner because the hot tub won’t work and Vand and Stevens are like, “you called him to come over here? WTF?” And Brie is like, “I want to use the hot tub and you apparently broke it. Sue me.”
The owner arrives, and there’s a confrontation. The owner dies - or so we’re lead to believe - and then everybody starts freaking out about what to do. Alison Brie wants to call the cops: slacker boy can go to jail - he killed somebody! Then the audience gets to realize that the guy didn’t actually die in the confrontation, but while the “Friends” gang is freaking out, a third party arrives and creeps into the house and finishes the owner off, and the audience gets to find out that the owner had nothing to do with the camera but this Third Party Murderer seems to be in control of the cameras.
This brings me to my second reason why should skip this movie.
Stuff continues, there’s still a bit of movie before all the actual horror movie stuff from the trailer happens, including an entire sequence of “let’s get rid of the body” that turns into “we’re mutilating a corpse and we’re okay with that.” It’s not great.
The owner of the house, it’s later revealed, had absolutely nothing to do with the cameras. Third Party Murderer was truly a third party, who happens to go around renting places on VRBO or whatever, and installs cameras everywhere, then leaves, and waits for other renters to show up, and uses copies of the keys he made to get in and go to Murder Town on those new renters.
Fine. It’s an interesting concept. The execution was sloppy.
But then… Dave Franco just had to go and open his dumb, beautiful mouth.
In an interview for IndieWire, Franco is quoted as saying:
The idea was inspired by own paranoia about the concept of home sharing, where I think about how the country is as divided as it's ever been, and no one trusts each other. Yet, we trust staying in the home of a stranger simply because of a few positive reviews online. In reality, while we were filming the movie there were new articles coming out every week about homeowners getting cameras in their place. All that being said, I still use all of the home sharing apps. In fact, I stayed in an Airbnb while filming this movie. I guess I was trying to explore that disconnect where we are all aware of the risks of staying in a stranger's home, but we never think anything bad will actually happen to us.
Your movie is expressly not about the owners putting cameras in their places and renting them out! Your movie is about some psycho who goes around with murderous intent and happens to use rentals as a way to cover his tracks (which I still don’t think would work, because to cover his tracks is he stealing credit cards to make the initial rentals where he goes in to set his trap? How does this work so he doesn’t get caught?). In the real world, if someone on AirBNB was renting their place out and then murdering people, they’d be caught red handed!
Franco, your concept and intent need to match what you’re presenting to your audience. You can’t put a movie out there (or any piece of art) and then afterwards try to shoehorn an idea like “well, we can’t trust who we’re renting from” into said movie where you very specifically told the audience “guess what, it’s not the owner!”
Also, it’s only after the 5 minutes of actual horror movie content at the end of the movie that we find out in a postscript that the Creepy Murder Man is just a deranged person who rents places, copies keys, installs cameras, and then leaves and waits to come back for murder. I’m all for a slow burn, but this is a slow burn that fizzles out.
