“The Rental,” a Horror Film About Love, Family, and Airbnb - The New Yorker

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In Hollywood, the term “dump months” is used to describe fallow periods in the release schedule, when audiences are less likely to go to theatres and revenue is low. It’s during these windows—January and February, say, or mid-August through September—that the arty, low-budget, or off-kilter movies show up, free from the shadow of blockbusters. In the coronavirus era, with most major studios moving big theatrical releases to 2021 or later, every month is a dump month. The films being released are, by and large, titles that never would have made a splash at the box office to begin with.

“The Rental,” a lean and slick thriller about a casual Airbnb stay gone catastrophically wrong, is one such film, and it thoroughly scratches the summer horror-flick itch. The directorial début of Dave Franco, brother to James Franco, the film follows two couples on a weekend getaway to a palatial, ocean-view rental house in the Pacific Northwest. There’s Charlie and Michelle, who, as played by Dan Stevens and Alison Brie, make a winning husband and wife. Then there’s Charlie’s troubled younger brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and his girlfriend, Mina (Sheila Vand), who’s strong-willed and accomplished, and who happens to be Charlie’s work partner at a newly successful venture-capital firm. Tucked away in a spectacularly remote part of the country, the four are left with nothing to do but confront the demons of their past. (Charlie has a secret history of philandering; Josh has a criminal record.) Franco and his co-writer, the indie-film darling Joe Swanberg, are deft observers of character. But they also manage to provide an entire summer’s worth of stimulation: “The Rental” is a slasher film masquerading as a psychological thriller, and is also a commentary on the racially fraught nature of renting an Airbnb, a seductive slice of real-estate pornography, a cautionary tale about the perils of surveillance technology, and, to top it all off, a study of a love quadrangle which allows for some titillating speculation about Dave Franco’s fraternal relationships. If I could see it again on the big screen, I would.

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“The Rental,” a Horror Film About Love, Family, and Airbnb - The New Yorker
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