Dave Franco's directorial debut 'The Rental' leaves you effectively unsettled

IFC

If you never thought “Drinking Buddies” would be remade as a thriller, you’re in for two surprises. The second is that “The Rental,” co-written by “Drinking Buddies” helmer Joe Swanberg and directed/co-written by Swanberg’s “Easy” star Dave Franco, still manages to be a tense morality play of unexpected polish. Few points for originality, but a lot for execution.

The setting: a seaside vacation home too beautiful not to lead to disaster. Because the guests are Charlie (Dan Stevens), his wife Michelle (Alison Brie, Franco’s wife), his business partner Mina (Sheila Vand) and his brother/Mina’s boyfriend Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and there’s clearly something not far beneath the surface between Charlie and Mina (who are celebrating a major step for their company). And, you know, Josh is a wild card who spent time in jail for beating someone close to death, so perhaps this deck could be tilted a tad toward chaos.

Franco and Swanberg are playing with illusions of comfort and privacy here in ways not entirely dissimilar to something as extreme as “Hostel,” and “The Rental” nearly tips into “I Know What You Did Last Summer” territory in more ways than one. Yet this is a strong genre exercise, and a filmmaking debut of serious confidence. Without overdoing it, Franco crystallizes several moments into something unique and unexpected: an early dissolve from the actual house to the listing of it, creating a distinction between perception and reality that’s too good to be true; the car seeming to be consumed by the scenery on the drive to the property; faces and backgrounds blurred to create an additional fog to match the boundaries every character has breached; and dialogue that practically comes with the sound of ice cracking. “Whatever I said to you at the time was probably true,” one character says when caught in a lie. For a damn creepy movie, “The Rental” has a number of quietly, perceptively hilarious lines.

Perhaps Franco and Swanberg don’t quite get to their goal of questioning privilege, but the recognition of debatably subtle forms of evil (the manager of the property initially rejects Mina’s request for the house but accepts it from Charlie, a white man) fits well into a narrative in which no one is totally innocent. “The Rental” is about shaky relationships trending toward devastation and the arrogance of telling yourself you’ve earned something and believing that shields you from consequences or the unpredictability of the outside world.

This 85-minute effort is lean and crisp like an envelope, and just as capable of piercing the skin.

B

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