The Telegraph
Dir: Dave Franco. Cast: Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White, Toby Huss, Anthony Molinari. 15 cert, 89 mins Dave Franco’s Airbnb chiller The Rental has a great poster – remember those? It’s an upside-down shot of a holiday home, invitingly warm inside, but with a silhouetted figure falling out of it into the night, or maybe the Pacific Ocean. “Secluded getaway. Killer views.” It gives away little but mood, promise and some mysterious off-screen threat, much like the film’s thoroughly skilful first hour. From the first shot of Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (Sheila Vand) gazing at this coastal retreat on a computer, we’re being toyed with. They seem intimate and conspiratorial, and agree to splurge. Then the scruffy Josh (Jeremy Allen White) bounds in, not meaning to interrupt. He’s Charlie’s brother and Mina’s boyfriend. So they’re business partners. Aha. It’s a deft bit of misdirection, establishing at a stroke certain tensions that this script, by Franco and the micro-budget veteran Joe Swanberg, will pluck and exploit until things are bloodily genre-fied. This trio, plus Charlie’s level-headed wife Michelle (Alison Brie), head to the house for an indulgent weekend, with celebrations mixed in: Charlie and Mina have just clinched a lucrative deal and it’s time to let their hair down. If there’s something a little off with the man who lets them in – an insinuating local played by Toby Huss – this could be simply a case of getting off on the wrong foot. But there’s a racial element. Mina’s surname is Mohammadi, which she’s pretty sure is the reason her attempt to book didn’t work, whereas Charlie had no trouble entering the same details an hour later. Something else is off. It could be a rustle in the breeze, or simply the way the camera spots this quartet on a walk across the beach, from a pointedly extreme distance. The film doesn’t need to use the hoary old cut-out of binoculars masking the frame to imply a sense they’re being watched. It manages without some hammer-wielding psycho’s heavy breathing, and builds atmosphere instead with the ominous low notes of a cool electronic score. Franco knows this terrain well enough to deal in suggestive hush, to play a waiting game, and to lay a bed of unease under the whole thing.
