Four Adults, Zero Brain Cells
The Rental is Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut, and it feels exactly like that: a polished, competently acted horror-thriller that’s absolutely convinced it’s deep while tripping over the dumbest plot decisions imaginable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a “We need to talk” text—tense, petty, and somehow still not about anything important by the end.
The setup is simple: two couples rent a gorgeous remote house on the Oregon coast for a weekend getaway. There’s a creepy caretaker, a dog that everyone forgets about until it’s convenient, secret affairs, hidden cameras, and a masked killer who seems less like a character and more like an aggressive Yelp review of the sharing economy. This should be tense and terrifying. Instead, it mostly plays like an extended PSA titled: Don’t Cheat, Don’t Do MDMA, and For the Love of God, Call the Police.
Meet the Worst Vacation Group in History
Our vacation squad:
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Charlie (Dan Stevens), smug startup bro with “nice guy” branding and the emotional integrity of a wet napkin.
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Michelle (Alison Brie), his wife, the only person with a conscience—and therefore doomed.
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Josh (Jeremy Allen White), Charlie’s brother, ex-con, golden retriever energy, anger management issues.
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Mina (Sheila Vand), Josh’s girlfriend and Charlie’s business partner, who is smart and competent right up until the script needs her not to be.
These people are allegedly adults with jobs and responsibilities. You would never know this from their behavior.
Early on, the film flirts with something interesting: Mina suspects the caretaker, Taylor (Toby Huss), might be racist after he rejects her booking but approves Charlie’s identical request minutes later. There’s an opportunity to explore bias, power dynamics, and the discomfort of being “othered” in someone else’s beautiful space. The movie glances at it, nods, and then sprints off to the “hot tub + drugs + cheating” section like it’s late for a CW audition.
Step One: Cheat. Step Two: Panic. Step Three: Make Everything Worse.
Michelle goes to sleep sober and responsible; the other three stay up, do MDMA, and quickly slide into “we were asking for it” territory. Josh passes out, and Charlie and Mina go from lingering eye contact to shower sex with lightning speed. Honestly, at this point, if a masked killer had just walked in and handed them an STD pamphlet, it would’ve been the healthiest thing happening in the house.
The next morning, Mina discovers a hidden camera in the shower. This should be a clear, simple moment: call the cops, press charges, sue Taylor, go home, maybe burn the house down out of spite. Instead, Charlie’s main concern is not “we are being filmed,” but “oh no, my wife might find out I couldn’t keep it in my pants for one entire day.”
So he convinces Mina not to call the police, because nothing says “I’m a decent human” like protecting a potential voyeuristic criminal so your affair stays secret. The movie wants us to feel his anxiety. Mostly, you just want to staple his mouth shut.
Taylor: Creepy, But Not That Creepy
Taylor is clearly meant to be the red herring: gruff, unpolished, vaguely hostile, the human equivalent of a rusted truck. He’s also the only one of the bunch who isn’t monumentally stupid. Is he off-putting? Yes. Does he deserve to be blamed for every weird thing in the house? Not really.
When Mina confronts him about the hidden camera, he denies knowing anything. They argue loudly. Josh, walking in on this chaos, assumes Taylor is attacking Mina and beats him unconscious. This is the film’s one moment of genuine tragedy—that a guy with bad social skills and worse vibes gets wrecked by the world’s dumbest misunderstanding.
While everyone is outside debating what to do (spoiler: the worst possible option), a masked stranger sneaks in and actually kills Taylor, framing Josh by default. The movie’s moral outlook is clear: if you’re creepy but innocent, good luck.
“Let’s Just Hide the Body” – Famous Last Words
From this point on, The Rental becomes a masterclass in what happens when four people collectively decide that the criminal justice system doesn’t exist.
Michelle: “We should call the police.”
Charlie: “No, we should stage his death and throw him off a cliff because my brother might go back to prison and also I cheated, which is emotionally the same as manslaughter.”
Not only do they agree to this idiotic plan, they execute it with all the grace of a drunk Jenga tournament. Taylor’s body gets stuck on a rock, so Josh has to climb down and shove it into the ocean with his bare hands. At this point, they are both morally and literally in deep water.
Michelle opts out of the cover-up and goes back inside, which is the one smart decision she makes—and naturally, it gets her killed. Because this is horror, and good behavior is for victims.
The Killer: Literally Just Some Guy
The masked stranger is the film’s big twist: he’s not Taylor, not someone they wronged, not connected to them at all. He’s just a rando with an anonymous mask and a hobby of installing cameras in rentals and murdering whoever shows up.
On one hand, this is a bleak, nihilistic punchline: evil isn’t personal, it’s random; you’re not special, you’re just next. On the other hand, it’s also a little… cheap. The movie spends so much energy building interpersonal drama and tension between the four leads that when the killer finally steps in, he feels like a late-stage rewrite.
He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t monologue, he doesn’t even have a specific quirk. He’s just “Airbnb Michael Myers” with a GoPro addiction. That might be unsettling in theory, but in practice he feels interchangeable with any other faceless home-invasion villain.
Deaths by Plot Obligation
Once the cover-up starts, the movie commits to wiping the cast like it’s clearing browser history:
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Michelle sees footage of Charlie and Mina having sex, bails in the car, hits a spike strip, crashes, and gets murdered.
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Charlie finds her body, is promptly murdered.
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Josh gets a video from Charlie’s phone revealing the affair, rushes to confront him, runs into the killer instead, and gets murdered.
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Mina flees into the fog, trips off a cliff, and dies in the ocean like an especially unlucky Instagram influencer.
It’s not that the deaths aren’t brutal; they’re just oddly flat. The human drama—cheating, lies, family tension—never meaningfully collides with the horror. The killer isn’t punishing them for their sins. He doesn’t care. They could’ve been four completely functional adults who never cheated or covered up a death and he’d have done the same thing. Which makes all their moral flailing feel like elaborate window dressing.
The message seems to be: “Don’t rent houses from strangers, or also do, it doesn’t matter, you’re going to die and your dog will live.”
The Dog Deserved Better (and Got It)
In perhaps the most unintentionally funny beat, the killer finishes scrubbing the crime scene, packs up his cameras, and is about to leave when Josh’s missing dog just wanders back into the house like, “Oh hey, is the third act over?”
The killer pets the dog and walks away. That’s it. No dog death, no chase, no stakes. Just a full-blown murderer with more ethical restraint than most horror directors. On a spiritual level, I respect this. On a storytelling level, it’s hilariously emblematic of the movie: the only innocent party gets a pass, everyone else dies because the script says so.
Epilogue: Booking the Next Victims
The film ends with the killer renting another property, installing cameras, and setting up for the next round. No backstory, no identity reveal, just a montage of “and this will keep happening because people love vacation rentals and the world is terrible.”
It’s a bleak closer that would land harder if the preceding 90 minutes had anything sharper to say about voyeur culture, gig-economy capitalism, or our obsession with curated experiences. Instead, it hits like a shrug: “Humans are bad at decisions and also sometimes murdered. Anyway, thanks for watching.”
Final Verdict: Add a Cleaning Fee and Move On
The Rental wants to be smart horror about intimacy, surveillance, and the secrets we bring into shared spaces. What it actually is, most of the time, is a nicely shot movie about four unlikable people making panicked, idiotic choices while an uninteresting killer lurks around collecting content.
The cast is great, the atmosphere is moody, and Franco clearly knows how to create tension. But without a meaningful point or a killer with any personality beyond “available,” the whole thing feels like one of those overpriced Airbnbs that looks better in photos than it feels once you’re actually stuck inside.
Would I recommend it? Sure—if you’re about to book a remote cabin with friends and you want a helpful reminder to:
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Not cheat on your partner,
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Always call the cops,
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And check for cameras before you decide the shower is the best place for bad life choices.
