“Quiet place. Terrible secrets ”- such a slogan was given by director D. Franco to the horror movie filmed in 2020, which is originally called The Rental. Russian localizers titled the film The Rental.
Four millennials – colleagues Charlie and Mina with their soulmates, wife Michelle and boyfriend Josh – go on a weekend trip. They book a luxurious villa through the site, take their pet pug with them, stock up on ecstasy and plan to “break away to the fullest” on vacation. However, from the first frames it becomes clear that the guys are going to where none of them will return alive.
But careless young people are not alarmed by anything: neither problems in obtaining employment, nor the most unpleasant landlord who met them, nor a dog that suddenly disappeared in the forest. The epiphany does not come until the morning of the second day, when Mina, taking a shower, discovers a hidden video camera. One by one, the heroes of a hard slasher become victims of a voyeuristic maniac.
What is shown at the end of “The Rental” and how to understand the ending
Despite the fact that Charlie and Mina try to hide their betrayal from their significant other, the truth still comes to the surface – thanks to the antics of a nameless and faceless masked killer. A sex scene filmed with a hidden camera in the shower is shown to Michelle on TV by an unknown person – as a result, she arranges a scene with Charlie, then leaves by car away from home.
In the dark, Michel falls into a trap: on the spikes thrown by the killer, the tires of the SUV scatter to shreds and the car flies off the road. Michelle tries to hide in the car from the killer and tries to contact Charlie by phone, but the maniac kills her.
Charlie rushes to help his wife anyway, but finds only a car with a broken side window and a bloody phone in the bushes. Then an unknown person attacks him – and the maniac kills another of the main characters. Charlie dies before he can warn his friends of the danger.
Meanwhile, Mina and Josh look for a hidden camera receiver to get rid of the evidence. Josh is still sure that he is to blame for the death of the owner of the house (whom he only beat up – the rest was completed by a masked serial killer), so the former criminal is ready for anything to cover his tracks and avoid punishment and police prosecution. Mina helps her boyfriend because she feels guilty about what happened. She promises Josh that they will get through this together.
The couple gets into that same secret room behind the door with a combination lock, but inside they do not find anything interesting. There is no observation point with many monitors inside.
When Mina briefly leaves Josh, he finds a secret passage in the room. Then, already in the house, he receives strange messages from his brother Charlie – an unknown killer sends a video of Mina’s betrayal.
Furious, Josh rushes around the house, yelling at Charlie and demanding that he come out to him. As he opens the closet door, a masked man comes out and hits Josh in the head with a hammer. Later, the maniac finishes off an injured Josh when he tries to stop him.
The killer starts chasing Mina. The girl in the dark tries to escape, but is first lost in the forest due to thick fog, and then falls off a cliff into the ocean. The bodies are not shown, but the authors of the film make it clear that the heroine died.
Then the masked maniac returns to the house, lays out the corpses and carefully disposes of evidence – for example, removes all hidden cameras. It turns out that an unknown person was watching every room and all the actions of the victims. We are not shown the face of the killer and are not hinted at at all about his identity. The point is that he is just an ordinary stranger, a random person who kills completely random people.
The only thing that the creators of The Rental clearly point out is that the maniac is not a flayer, but a hunter of people. When Reggie’s dog returns to the house, the killer tries to pet him. But it does not intend to cause any harm to the animal.
The essence of the film The Rental in the scene after the credits
If you’ve been wondering why the masked man killed the main characters in Who Didn’t Hid, the answer is simple: because he can. There is no secret meaning, just another crazy person who rents houses through the site, then makes duplicate keys during their stay, installs cameras in houses and apartments…
And then it comes back when completely different people rent housing. And kills them – just for fun. All this is directly shown in the scene after the credits in The Rental.
Director/Writer Dave Franco Explains the Ending and Plot of Horror Film Who Hasn’t Hid (The Rent)
In an interview with the LA Times , actor, director and screenwriter Dave Franco revealed that when making his debut feature film, The Rental was inspired by classic horror films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , The Shining and ” Halloween» ( Halloween ), and the works of popular modern filmmakers – Ari Astaire, Jordan Peele, Jennifer Kent, Amy Seimetz and Sean Durkin. In general, Franco watched a lot of horror films before starting to create his own.
In addition, in an interview, Dave Franco admitted that he would like to make a sequel to The Rental. True, the author did not disclose the details of the horror The Rental 2″. But will there even be a second part?
I will happily continue my journey and make many films in the horror genre. I already have a solid idea for a sequel [Who Hasn’t Hidden] if there is an opportunity to continue the story.
How did Dave Franco come up with the idea of making a former tenant set up traps for the next tenants as the main villain and maniac?
I just thought about the amazing idea that we trust the people we rent from and don’t even think about how long the other tenants stayed in these houses, could they make duplicate keys so they could come back later and do what comes in head. Just a creepy idea that I wanted to explore.
And the meaning of the ambiguous ending of The Rental is that the creators of the horror film wanted to make the audience guess what is happening. The bottom line is that we never found out – Mina died at the end, falling off a cliff into the water, or not.
At the end of the film, there is a scene in which Mina runs away from the killer and she sees almost nothing because of the thick fog – so much so that she does not even notice that she is standing on the edge of a cliff – and falls down. We did not show her body in the ocean because we wanted to let the audience interpret what happened on their own – whether she survived after the fall or not.
Then Dave Franco admitted that he had not even considered an alternative version of the horror The Rental, in which one of the four main characters could survive. The ending The Rental in all versions of the script was about the inevitable death at the hands of a faceless and nameless killer. But in the end, the dog survived!
I think all four died in all versions of the script. And that’s partly because we wanted to let the killer come out clean and let him continue his routine. I think most people expect at least someone to survive. But we did everything possible so that at least the dog survived – and this is a small spectator victory. There is such a strange thing: while watching, we sympathize more with animals than with people. I think because we are sure that they are completely innocent creatures who do not deserve to suffer. And besides, purely technically, Reggie the dog is the only one who hasn’t done anything wrong in the entire movie. And that allowed him to survive in the end.
