88 min | R | July 24, 2020 | IFC Films
Two couples rent a beautiful coastal house for a weekend getaway. The host gives them a creepy feeling, the cell service drops out, and the secrets they brought with them start to surface. By the time they figure out the real threat, paranoia has already done most of the work.
Charlie and Michelle book a remote oceanside rental to celebrate a business win with Charlie’s brother Josh and Josh’s girlfriend Mina. Mina is also Charlie’s business partner. The film spends its first hour watching these four people negotiate the small betrayals and buried attractions that the weekend exposes. Dave Franco builds the dread out of human behavior before he builds it out of anything else. The house is not haunted. The people are the problem, and the film knows that.
Dan Stevens plays Charlie as a man whose easy confidence curdles into something selfish under pressure. He is charming until charm stops working, and Stevens lets the mask slip in increments. Alison Brie plays Michelle as the most decent person in the house, which is exactly why the weekend goes badly for her. Sheila Vand plays Mina with a sharp suspicion that the others want to dismiss as paranoia, and she is right to be suspicious. Jeremy Allen White plays Josh as the volatile younger brother who carries a temper the others tiptoe around. Toby Huss plays the property manager Taylor with a low simmering hostility that reads as bigotry first and something worse second.
Franco directs his first feature and co-writes with Joe Swanberg. The script keeps the camera close on the four leads and lets the geography of the house do the work that exposition would otherwise do. Christian Sprenger shoots the interiors in cool gray daylight that makes the luxury feel cold and exposed. The hidden cameras become a visual motif before they become a plot point, and the framing keeps reminding you that someone could be watching. The score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans holds back during the dialogue and arrives only when the film turns.
The turn is where the film loses some of its nerve. Franco spends an hour on a smart chamber drama about trust and surveillance and then hands the last act to a more conventional thriller. The closing stretch trades the specific human menace for a generic one, and the trade flattens what came before. There is real craft in the setup and real discipline in the performances. The ending settles for the version of this story you have seen before.