The Rental (2020)

(Netflix Streaming, November 2022) While I don’t, in theory, object to mid-film genre shifting, some swerves are rougher than others. Taking a creepy paranoid thriller built on secrets, infidelities, voyeurism and resentment against the rich is a pretty good foundation for any genre shift…. But following that up with a psycho killer slasher that doesn’t resolve any subplots as much as it kills everyone involved in them is really not the way to go. I suppose that part of my seething hatred for The Rental has its roots in my overall dislike of the slasher subgenre. The other part of it is that the film seems to be doing a lot of work in setting up its dramatic subplots (not being particularly interesting at it either, but that’s a separate issue) that by the time an unknown and unrevealed killer starts slicing the pretentious and unlikable characters of the film, it seems like a darker take on lazy “it was all a dream” storytelling clichés. In this case: we killed everyone for no particular reason, so the story has ended without really needing us to go through the work of offering a conclusion. This isn’t satisfying, and the film doesn’t make any kind of point about, I don’t know, reclaiming rental properties from rich arrogant out-of-towners; the banality of evil; or even a satire of psycho killer movies. But no: in the hands of writer-director-producer Dave Franco, The Rental has little point, and no perceptible sense of humour even as it kills off its last remaining character not through stabbing but by making her fall off a cliff. From annoying in its first half, The Rental gets exasperating in its second half by not caring about storytelling structure, character or genre. The only way The Rental could have been worse is if its insipid characters had survived.