The Rental

Pretty effective thriller. Two couples (including Alison Brie and that weird looking kid from Shameless with the sort of bulbous face that proves there’s a “handsome uncanny valley” halfway between normal-looking and The Elephant Man) rent an oceanside airbnb from a vaguely threatening, racist dude. There’s an affair going on between two of the couples, and someone finds a camera in a showerhead, and yet somehow it manages to build suspense slowly, and turns out to be be much better and less formulaic than it initially seems like it’s going to be. Only problem is it finally turns from a suspense film into a slasher film. But that’s only at the end, and until then it’s pretty good, and after the carnage it then continues on to a decent ending where a slightly less less ambitious movie would have just stopped. One does wonder, though, if it was necessary to introduce the infidelity and other interpersonal tension-building angles if it was going to turn into a slasher flick that ended up having nothing to do with them, even if the dumbest, slasher-flickiest parts of it were still more intelligent than many slasher flicks.