| IFC Films | Release Date (Streaming): July 24, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
20
Mixed:
8
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Jul 23, 2020
The Rental boats a strong cast, an intriguing set up, and a compelling mystery. It's a fun and feisty web of lies and deception with the added bonus of having a shadowy, stalking presence surrounding everything and everyone like a God-hand. It's a small film, but it's tense, dense, and delivers a harrowing final act.
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Jul 24, 2020
It’s a scarily efficient little horror movie, directed by Dave Franco in his feature debut, who proves knowledgeable about his subject. Really knowledgeable, evidently, because he and co-writer Joe Swanberg dip into just about every trope of the genre by the end of the 88-minute running time.
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Jul 22, 2020
The Rental has De Palma vibes with Fincher’s cool, but lacks the former’s exploitative pleasures and the latter’s cinematic expertise. It is, however, satisfyingly composed in terms of approach, giving the audience flashes of brutality to come or shooting it from a distance, heightening the shock and lending bloodshed sharp flinching power.
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IndieWireJul 21, 2020
The PlaylistAug 6, 2020
Actor turned director Dave Franco delivers the goods in his unsettling directorial debut, in this regard— a seemingly morally ambiguous thriller that doesn’t tell you whether you should be rooting for the innocents or the bad guys and seems to have things on its mind to say about trust, privilege, infidelity, privacy, surveillance and more.
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Jul 22, 2020
Much of the first half of the film plays like a straight drama, establishing the conflicts simmering between two couples on a weekend getaway. This setup is so credible, in fact, that it’s doubly disappointing when the thriller elements do finally materialize and then promptly fail to thrill; it’s as if someone snatched the remote and changed the channel to a half-assed slasher starring the same characters.
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PolygonAug 18, 2020
Unfortunately, The Rental unravels. Rather than building on the characters’ moralistic inequities, and relating them to their unknown voyeurist, Franco lets the final act wither under the weight of facile jump scares and an unimaginative killer who apes one of horror’s iconic maniacs.
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Jul 20, 2020
Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.
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Movie NationJul 20, 2020
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