Dave Franco’s ‘The Rental’: Film Review
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticStuck together in close quarters, usually at a remote house somewhere, a small group of people tell truths, play mind games, and watch their relationships (and lives) gradually unravel. It’s a genre as classic and variable as Polanski’s “Cul-de-Sac,” Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Peckinpah’s “The Osterman Weekend,” or Aronofsky’s “Mother!” And it almost always comes in one of two flavors: high-end psychodrama or low-end thriller.The hooky thing about “The Rental,” the first feature directed by Dave Franco, is that in just 88 minutes the film exploits, and exhausts, more or less every possibility of the late-night-domestic-bull-session-in-hell pressure-cooker genre.