Sheila Vand in The rent.
Photo: Courtesy of IFC Films
Horror movies about strange houses are really about the people in them at best. And for a while, Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The rentIt seems that this lesson has been taken seriously. After two couples on a whim decide to take a quaint, remote vacation rental over the weekend, she creates suspense by portraying her characters with each other while using the setup primarily as a convenient escalation device, at least, until everything falls apart. dissipate in such a situation. spectacularly unsatisfactory fashion that you will wonder if you dreamed of everything
The couples in question are tech startup Honcho Charlie (Dan Stevens) and his wife, Michelle (Alison Brie), and Josh (Jeremy Allen White), Charlie’s less cunning and less financially successful younger brother, who is dating Mina. (Sheila Vand). ), Charlie’s business partner. You might be able to guess the character’s dynamics just from that brief description: yes, Josh seems to have an inferiority complex around his most successful brother and, yes, there does seem to be some extracurricular romantic tension between his co-workers Mina and Charlie ( a lot so I assumed they were lovers after the opening scene.) Do Michelle and Josh notice what is clearly happening between their loved ones? Michelle seems too tolerant, too tolerant to acknowledge it, while Josh is perhaps too anxious, too self-flagellating to do so.
Either way, the foursome’s weekend getaway begins on an awkward note when Mina convinces herself that Taylor (Toby Huss), the brusque and vaguely creepy property manager, is intolerant of her because of her Middle Eastern name. Things get a little more subtle when they realize that Taylor simply enters the rental whenever she wants (an extremely related Airbnb fear). But at first it’s all suggested horror: We never see Taylor enter the house, which means we are always vigilant, waiting for something to go wrong, whatever it is. For a movie where not much happens in the first half, The rent manages to be admirably tense.
The real drama arises from our four protagonists. They may not be particularly pleasant, but they are recognizable, their passive-aggressive behavior of not harming each other, which clearly covers all kinds of resentment and doubt. At first, their round trip holds our interest because the underlying conflicts between them mock rather than consent. Stevens always brings a cunning, hard-to-pinpoint sense of threat to his parts; he is half soft, half predatory. (That’s why he made a great false romantic role in the recent Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of the Fire Saga.) Here, we never know if Charlie is being sincere or calculating, and sometimes seems, paradoxically, to be both. Vand, meanwhile, plays the miserable Mina with a good balance of stridency and vulnerability. When you confront the property manager about your possible racism, we can’t tell if you are doing it out of personal honor or lack of control. That uncertainty feels intentional on the part of the filmmakers, and it also informs how we might interpret some of their subsequent actions.
I know I’m being lazy about The rentThe plot. Not because it’s particularly original, it certainly isn’t, but because the movie actually skips sub-genres, starting as a psychological thriller, then turning into something much more paranoid, before settling for … well, I’ve said too much, but the Things eventually go in what seems like a more basic and disappointing direction. Franco is not what I would call a rigorous director, but he shows admirable control. You have a good understanding of the framework and the possibility of suspense within it; I often found myself looking over the shoulders of the characters, wondering if something would emerge from the deep dark night behind them. It also makes sure to keep quietly questioning how far we can trust these people to begin with. In fact, that’s why some of the scenes afterwards feel like a disappointment – the movie has worked too hard making us worry about the fate of these characters to [redacted] a, well, [redacted] so [redacted]. There may be some existential meaning to The rentIt is an abrupt end, too easy. But if you ask me, I think Dave Franco ran out of money, time and ideas.
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