BEFORE: Anthony Molinari carries over from "The Forever Purge", where he played the unforgettable character "Mercenary #1". I'm a bit concerned, because this looks like it might be the shakiest connection of the year so far - I'm trusting the IMDB here, because that's an uncredited role, he doesn't appear in the credits on-screen at the end, it means he was added later, perhaps claimed a role in the film himself, and that's not always accurate. I'm going on faith here, I've contributed so many updates and changes to IMDB listings myself, particularly documentaries, so I'm hoping that's created enough good karma over the years that Mr. Molinari was really somewhere in "The Forever Purge".
His part in "The Rental" is also uncredited, so it's a double whammy, twice the opportunity for the link to not be valid. In tonight's film he plays the perhaps-equally- unnoticable role of "Man". Yeah, this could be where my linking fails me, but since I was kind of Frankenstein-ing three smaller horror chains together this year, I was forced to depend on this link just to hit my quota and make everything work out. So here's hoping.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Barbarian" (Movie #4,558)
THE PLOT: Two couples rent a vacation home for what should be a celebratory weekend get-away.
AFTER: Well, I worried for nothing, maybe, because Anthony Molinari does have a big role here, if the IMDB and the other parts of the internet are trustworthy, I just can't say what it is. "No spoilers" doesn't really work very well any more, because any time I look anything up, or even dub a film to DVD, there are bound to be spoilers. Thank God this film's on Netflix, so I could go in almost completely cold, and not see anything before I was supposed to see it. But damn, how do I even talk about it now?
It was just over a year ago that I watched "Barbarian", another film that starts with the same premise, "Hey, let's rent an AirBnB, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?" And that film itself was kind of a repeat of "Alone Together", a romance film that, like "Barbarian", started off with two people accidentally renting the SAME AirBnB for the same time period, but damn, there could not be two films that start off the same with totally different endings.
In a similar way, "The Rental" kind of starts off like a relationship-driven movie, there are two couples, the guy from "The Bear" and the guy from "Downton Abbey" are brothers, and Charlie, the older brother, wants to celebrate a big business deal he just made, so he rents a beach house and brings along his wife Michelle, his brother Josh and his business partner (who is in a relationship with his brother). Right from the start, I thought that Charlie and his business partner, Mina, were a little too chummy, I thought they were a couple because of the movie's first scene, where they're looking at beach house rentals together, something a couple might do.
Then, after spending a couple days together at the beach house, with some people wanting to relax and others deciding to party with drugs and booze, it seems like Charlie's really got a thing for his business partner, because their partners go to bed and they end up in the hot-tub together. I think there was a "Seinfeld" episode about something like this move called "The Switch", and as we all know, in the history of relationships, nobody has ever been able to pull off a successful partner switch. Sure, maybe it's the booze and the ecstasy, but what's the plan here, start a new relationship with his brother's girlfriend and tell his wife to date his brother? It's never going to work out, feelings are always going to be hurt.
But you know, hot tubs and showers, people getting high and getting loose, things are bound to happen, and then the next morning there's regret and shame and an unwillingness to deal with what happened. Michelle and Josh go off on a hike, and Charlie and Mina are left alone in the house, they agree that their affair was a one-time thing and could never happen again. Sure, sweep it all under the rug, that should work, there's no way the events of this vacation could come back to haunt them. But you know it's going to, whether this is a relationship movie, or a horror movie, it's going to come up again, it's just a matter of time.
Then suspicious things start to happen - during one of her dozen showers over this two-day weekend, Mina thinks she spots a camera in the shower head and a wire coming from the wall - that would mean that someone's been spying on them, and has footage of the affair, which moved from the hot tub to the shower, of course. And there's a crawl-space beneath the house that's got a keypad lock on it, there's probably a room down there with a dozen monitors for hidden cameras and somebody making their own porn movies. Sure, could happen, probably does happen. Then Josh's dog goes missing, and they weren't supposed to bring a pet to the AirBnB in the first place, now they can't ask the surly racist caretaker if he's seen their dog, because that would tip him off that they broke the rules.
But they need the caretaker to fix the hot tub, so reluctantly they ask him to come over, and when they confront him, things get out of hand. That's all the plot I'm willing to divulge, but come on, you know it's October and this is a horror movie, not the relationshippy film it started out as, so probably it's not going to end well, is it? That is one "Switch" that does really work here, that it starts out as one kind of genre film and ends up being another, though it really takes some time, you might think that the film got misclassified because it's such a slow boil. But once things start to happen, they really happen.
The scariest thing is, with modern technology most of this, if not all, is quite possible. In the old days people had to build elaborate two-way mirror set-ups to be total pervs, but cameras are micro-sized now, and transmit wirelessly, and it's not too far of a stretch to think that this all really could happen. Most people's lives might not be worth spying on, but then again, you never know. This film was released in the summer of 2020, so at the height of the pandemic, a bit of bad luck there. But it's on Netflix now, so be sure to catch it before it goes away. And if a listing on AirBnB seems too good to be true, maybe it is.
Also starring Dan Stevens (last seen in "Her Smell"), Alison Brie (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Sheila Vand (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Jeremy Allen White (last seen in "Movie 43"), Toby Huss (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Connie Wellman and Chunk (the dog).
RATING: 6 out of 10 "Bro"-related puns
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