The Rental

Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes they happen to horrible people, like the characters in The Rental – the rare horror film where identifying with the killer isn't morally reprehensible. Charlie (Dan Stevens), his wife Michelle (Alison Brie), Charlie's brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and Josh's girlfriend Mina (Sheila Vand ), decide to rent a beachfront house for a weekend getaway. Charlie, Michelle and Mina are successful professionals; Josh is dumber than a rock. How dumb is Josh? At one point he says he just got a "weird text message" and proceeds to play a voicemail. This must have been intentional; otherwise it's writers Joe Swanberg and Dave Franco (who also directs) who are dumb, and based on their movie they're anything but. Brie is as effective here as she was in a very different role in Horse Girl, and Toby Huss, who plays the house owner's brother, and who is known mostly for his work in comedy (nerds like me will remember him as Artie, the world's strongest man, in The Adventures of Pete & Pete), is surprisingly chilling – although he isn't the 'monster;' he is actually a victim of real-life monsters: hipsters who knowingly bring pets to a rented house even though pets are not allowed; who play the 'race card' when things don't go their way; who are almost forty years of age but still drop acid; who have no control over their sexual urges; who believe that being able to beat the tar out of someone means they are in the right; and so on so forth. With the exceptions of Brie's and Huss's characters, it's hard to feel sorry for the people in the movie. And now, as The Rock would say, here are the damn veggies. There is a not-very-mysterious mystery at the end of The Rental. The killer wears a mask, and even though he takes it off at some point, we never see his face; this doesn't really matter because his face wouldn't tell us anything we don't already know. The Law of Economy of Characters says that no movie introduces a character unnecessarily, and a simple process of elimination pinpoints Huss's character's brother as the killer – what with him being the only living person with full access to the house and all. Now, since this character is mentioned but never seen, showing us his face at the end would be like, meh. The reason I mention all this is because, in the final moments of The Rental, I couldn't shake the sinking feeling that even before the film was over its makers were already thinking about the inevitable sequel. All in good time, boys; all in good time.