CUT THE SLASHER
Dave Franco gets chance to show off his talents from the director’s chair
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 Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend, or Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!
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 four-hander about two couples spending a weekend getaway at a fabulous cliffside cottage along the Pacific Ocean. 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.
That said, most of it is skilful 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).
At the vacation house, the manager, Taylor (Toby Huss), is a prickly prole whose attitude teeters between friendly, creepy, and passive-aggressive. Is he the closet racist who rented the place to Charlie one hour after refusing it to the Iranian-american Mina?
When a tiny camera is found embedded in a shower head, Taylor suddenly looks like a secret perv. Of course, the drama is that Charlie and Mina, after their respective mates crash for the night, have given him a lot to gawk at. And a lot they don’t want seen.
Franco stages all of this with a conventional laid-back flair. He’s working from a script he co-wrote with Joe Swanberg, and together they’ve created characters who are just interesting enough that, at times, I caught myself wishing that the film didn’t have to turn into a thriller, so that we could hang out with them in a way that’s more Albee than Wes Craven.
Franco knows just where to place the camera and how to keep naturalistic scenes skipping along.
We’re on Charlie and Mina’s side (because movies tend to favour passion), but also not ( because they tend to look askance at the thorny entanglements that emerge from lies). And the way the film heightens this ambiguity through the paranoia of surveillance is notably clever.
So did The Rental really need a diabolical slasher? It did not.
Except for one reason: to cut its drama together with the demon of commerce.