The Rental

  Actor Dave Franco’s debut as writer/director is an impressive expression of these times. 

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen this film don’t read on.

Like the classic whodunit, the horror mystery is usually a whosdoingit. That is, we play Guess the Killer from the array of Usual Suspects. Also, there is also usually a survivor, or two, you know, to encourage our spirit to Carry On. We want to feel scared not hopeless.

Not here. Both couples are killed off, as is the only other speaking role in the main body. And the killer, once exposed, is unnamed, faceless, unknown beyond his role as high-tech voyeur and slaughterer. 

The two central couples are polished, attractive identification figures for us. Charlie and his brother Josh’s girlfriend Mina are bright successful designers of something, celebrating a big contract. Hence their weekend getaway to a posh private rental. 

Josh is a troubled soul, a college drop-out with an assault record, who “hit the jackpot” in winning Mina. As Charlie’s lover Michelle thinks she did, until the drugs and booze shatter the relationships.The accomplished characters exemplify the civilization here at risk. With every advantage the two couples are helpless under this attack.  

In making Mina an ethnic minority sensitive to discrimination, the drama expands its sense of currency. Estate manager Taylor is a racist, sexist, sinister working man, clearly the Professional Class’s nightmare. That is, the central cast embodies the current division in America, where the economic and cultural gap has led to an unbridgeable divide. 

This chasm is set against the opulence of the holiday retreats. Expensive rentals in the glorious wild, who could ask for anything more? But every Eden has its serpent. This idyll is shattered by an inescapable evil. 

More to the point: that evil is Unknown. It’s a force beyond the antagonistic social camps represented by the first five characters we meet. Also, while its savagery is as basic as a hammer it has a remarkable technical savvy, as the villain reveals when he continues to rent a place, install his voyeuristic technology and proceed to kill on. He has the “motiveless malignity” Coleridge attributed to Iago, but with enviable electronic savvy.

That’s the point of the film. America’s — indeed, the free world’s — division into two unaccommodating camps leaves it helpless before an outside threat worse than their suspected enemy. The core having crumbled, there can be no survivors within that society, only the rampaging evil extending its campaign. Complacency kills.