The Rental
DIRECTOR: Dave Franco
STARRING: Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White STUCK TOGETHER IN CLOSE QUARTERS, usually at a remote house somewhere, a small group of people tell truths, play mind games and watch their relationships (and lives) gradually unravel. It’s a genre as classic and variable as Polanski’s “Cul-de-sac,” Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Peckinpah’s “The Osterman Weekend” or Aronofsky’s “Mother!” And it almost always comes in one of two flavors: high-end psychodrama or low-end thriller. The hooky thing about “The Rental,” the first feature directed by Dave Franco, is that in just 88 minutes the film exploits, and exhausts, more or less every possibility of the late-night-domestic-bull-session-in-hell pressure-cooker genre. It starts off as a shrewdly arresting fourhander about two couples spending a getaway weekend at a fabulous cliffside cottage along the Pacific Ocean — a kind of dark-and-stormy indie soap-opera noir on ecstasy. Then it evolves into a suspense drama of sex, lies and (secret) videotape. There’s a murder, and therefore a corpse, at which point the film enters a Hitchcock zone of ordinary people scrambling to get away with extraordinary crime. The saga is then overrun by, yes, an omniscient masked slasher. There’s some crafty artistry at work in “The Rental,” and also some fairly standard pandering, which feels like a violation of the movie’s better instincts. That said, most of it is skillful and engrossing enough to establish Franco as a director to watch. Dan Stevens, with his slightly bland surface camouflaging moody undercurrents, plays Charlie, a successful tech wizard married to the sharp, conventional Michelle (Alison Brie). Charlie’s brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), is a ne’er-do-well with a hothead temper who’s dating Charlie’s business partner, Mina (Sheila Vand). Charlie and Mina have a close working relationship, maybe too close for their own good. I staunchly believe that the term