Some of the best horror movies are like home invasions, with horror like the invader and some other genre playing the role of the house. Do you think you are watching the gentle story of a lonely widower doing false auditions to find a new wife? Think again, because the needles and wire come out of the piano. Horror is definitely an interruption in The rent, the first feature film written and directed by Dave Franco. (Yes, that Dave Franco.) Although there are some telltale signs of something threatening going on: a sinisterly closed door, a couple of voyeuristic POV shots of the Jason Voorhees variety, much of the first half of the movie plays as a direct drama, setting the simmering conflicts. between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setting is so believable, in fact, that it is doubly disappointing when the suspense elements finally materialize and then fail to thrill; It is as if someone snatched away the remote control and changed the channel to a half slasher starring the same characters.
Yes Jaws made the public afraid to go to the beach, The rent It seems designed to ruin a different source of summer fun: group vacations. The property of the same name is a spacious house overlooking the ocean. It’s the perfect place for a couple of holidays, partners Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (agree).A girl walks home alone at night‘s Sheila Vand), who look at the list, talking to each other to pay the high price of the reservation. It should be clarified that Charlie and Mina are professional partners, not romantics: they run a startup, although the film doesn’t have much interest in the details of their business. Franco counts on us confusing the two for lovers; its chemistry is the first problem of many bubbles below the surface of the film. Mina is actually dating Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White), a sweet but short-tempered boy whose career as a Lyft driver generates a lot of condescension for him from his older and more successful brother. Meanwhile, Charlie is married to Michelle (Alison Brie, Franco’s own wife), who does not feel threatened by her husband’s close relationship with his co-worker, although perhaps he should be..
Franco co-wrote The rent with mumblecore pioneer Joe Swanberg, and for a time, it works well as a relationship study along the lines of the past Drinking friends, complete with a focus on inconvenient attraction among thirty-something. In addition to the intimacy charged with the dynamics of the group, the film accumulates tensions of race and class. When the four arrive at the house, there is a thorny exchange between the owner’s brother (character actor Toby Huss) and Mina, whose request was denied, presumably because of her Middle Eastern last name. She is guilty of her own assumptions: “Your Do you own this place? he asks incredulously, the man’s accent and the vibe of the working class don’t match his mental image of someone with money. Franco also laughs knowing how vacation priorities can get out of sync; like in MidsommarSeveral scenes are devoted to the divisive question of when to use drugs. (Within a strong cast, Brie most successfully navigates the transition from mundane irritations like having to get high only to a life-altering danger.)
However, this is primarily a prelude. Finally, The rent it falls into the worst case scenario of predatory surveillance, one that intersects with secrets that are destructively kept between the characters. But after all the care put into developing these relationships, the scares almost feel like an afterthought, as if the movie remembered at the last minute what genre it was supposed to be occupying and He hastily improvised a violent climax. As a filmmaker, Franco fortunately does not possess any of his older brother’s pompous excesses; The rent It lasts 88 energetic and unassuming 88 minutes, and it runs clean and elegant. But there is an indifference to what goes through its established pieces: beyond a jarring shot of someone running at full speed in a crashed car, the horror is presented as superficially as it is. Curiously, the life-and-death material turns out to be much less suspenseful than the possibility of infidelity looming over the social misfortune of the first half.
To be fair, The rent It would probably be a little creepier any other summer, when more viewers could be planning trips on their own, though seeing friends in close contact, touching someone else’s house surfaces inspires some accidental pinpricks of anxiety, in the same way. that crowded beaches currently seem terrifying even without a shark prowling its waters. Much more than the year other Airbnb horror movie, Kevin Bacon’s cooler You should have gone, The rent at least attempts to exploit the haunting implications of our new normal journey: touching the annoyances of the tenants should You feel like occupying a house that is not yours. How much can some star ratings tell you about the people who open their doors? And isn’t there something a little puzzling about their freedom to come and go whenever they want, their access to you at the turn of a key? Franco steals these fears, but his film still feels like an exquisite corpse of gender miscalculation, one that fails to develop a meaningful relationship between the story it seems to tell and the harsh but arbitrary way it is resolved. In other words, don’t trust the list: This is half a horror movie at best, and that’s not the best half.
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