Unfortunate events befall both decent and awful individuals, a reality reflected in The Rental – an unusual horror movie where sympathizing with the antagonists isn't necessarily wrong. Charlie (Dan Stevens), his wife Michelle (Alison Brie), Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and Josh’s girlfriend Mina (Sheila Vand) choose to rent a beachfront house for a weekend trip. Charlie, Michelle, and Mina are accomplished professionals; Josh is not particularly bright. Just how lacking in intelligence is he? He once described a "weird text message" and then played back the voicemail it contained. This seems deliberate; otherwise, it would be writers Joe Swanberg and Dave Franco (who also directs) who deserve criticism, which wouldn’t fit with what they've created. Brie delivers a performance here as strong as her previous one in Horse Girl, and Toby Huss, playing the house owner's brother, is surprisingly unsettling – though he isn’t the central threat; rather, he’s a casualty of real-world annoyances: hipsters who disregard rental agreements by bringing pets, those who invoke racial slurs when things go against them, people nearing forty who still take hallucinogens, individuals with unchecked desires, and those who believe physical dominance equates to moral righteousness. With the exception of Brie's and Huss’s characters, it’s difficult to feel compassion for the film’s inhabitants. And now, as Dwayne Johnson might put it, here are the details. The Rental concludes with a not-so-complicated resolution. The killer wears a mask, and while it is removed at one point, his face isn't revealed because it wouldn't add anything significant to what we already understand. The principle of economical character development dictates that no film introduces characters without purpose, and by process of elimination, the house owner’s brother is identified as the killer – primarily because he’s the only person with unrestricted access to the property. Revealing his face at the end would be unnecessary. I bring all this up because, during the closing scenes of The Rental, I couldn't dismiss a nagging feeling that its creators were already considering a sequel. Take it easy, guys; there’s plenty of time.

Source on TMDB