108 min | NR | September 11, 2020 | IFC Midnight
David is a lonely man in 1990 who cares for his ailing mother and pays a video service to find him a wife. Then he finds a discarded VHS tape of a man named Andy who promises to be his friend. The tape talks back, and David starts to listen.
David lives in his mother’s basement and spends his days caring for her as dementia erases her. He has signed up for Video Rendezvous, a dating service that records his lonely pitch onto tape. While he waits for a match, he discovers a cassette called Rent-A-Pal. On the tape, a man named Andy looks into the camera and offers the friendship David has never had. Jon Stevenson builds the film around the moment a one-way recording starts to feel like a conversation. Rent-A-Pal is about how isolation turns a stranger on a screen into the only voice that listens.
Brian Landis Folkins plays David as a man who has folded himself small to survive. He carries decades of resentment under a soft and apologetic surface, and Folkins lets it leak out in flinches before it ever becomes rage. Wil Wheaton plays Andy with the bright sincerity of a self-help host and the menace hiding underneath it. Every line Andy speaks is prerecorded, and Wheaton calibrates each pause so David can fill it with whatever he needs to hear. Kathleen Brady plays Lucille, David’s mother, with the cruelty and confusion that dementia leaves behind. Amy Rutledge plays Lisa, a caregiver who answers David’s video profile and offers him a real connection he no longer knows how to accept.
Jon Stevenson writes and directs his first feature with a tight grip on its period and its dread. He shoots the basement in sickly amber light and boxes David inside tight frames that shrink as the tape takes hold. The cutting between David’s face and Andy’s recorded eyeline manufactures a false conversation that the editing sells as genuine. The VHS grain and the dead glow of the television do more than fix the year as 1990. They turn the screen into a one-way mirror that David mistakes for a window. The score stays low and patient and lets the silence in the house do the work.
The film is strongest when it stays in the basement with two men who are really one man arguing with himself. Stevenson trusts the slow accumulation of small humiliations and the way loneliness rewrites a person’s sense of what he is owed. The final act trades that patience for the mechanics of a thriller, and the precision loosens as the plot demands escalation. What lingers is the central idea. A man starved for company will accept any voice that pretends to care, and the pretending is enough.