The Rental (2020)
Directed by Dave Franco
No — The Rental is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Rental is a lean piece of genre engineering from Dave Franco, set on the Oregon coast and built around two couples, a hidden camera, an infidelity, and a stranger who turns a weekend getaway into a body count.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes Sheila Vand as an Iranian-American character, but her ethnicity is never remarked upon and functions as ordinary casting rather than a statement.
A faint undercurrent about the commodification of aspirational real estate and the surveillance economy exists, but it is never developed into an argument.
The female characters are largely victims of infidelity and violence; no feminist thesis is advanced.
The film is a lean thriller that shows rather than tells, offering no moralizing monologues or social sermons.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the film.
Race is not a subject of the film at all; the characters' conflicts are purely interpersonal.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body-positive themes or messaging.
No neurodivergent characters or themes.
No historical revisionism; the film is a contemporary genre piece.
Why it received this score
The Rental is a lean piece of genre engineering from Dave Franco, set on the Oregon coast and built around two couples, a hidden camera, an infidelity, and a stranger who turns a weekend getaway into a body count. It is a film that shows more than it tells. The cast includes Sheila Vand as Mina Mohammadi, and her Iranian-American identity is simply present, unremarked, part of the ordinary texture of the story. That is casting, not commentary, and the film treats it as such.
The film has no interest in the contemporary identity and environmental concerns that occupy so much of modern storytelling. Its women are mostly victims of cheating and violence, and no feminist thesis is advanced on their behalf. A faint undercurrent about aspirational real estate and the surveillance economy drifts through the plot. The rental house is a commodity, the camera is a product, the killer is a customer. But the film never develops this into an argument. It is too busy tightening the screws.
The moral universe here is interpersonal and grim. There are no sermons, no lectures, no speeches about the state of the world. That restraint is both the film's virtue and its limit. It wants to be a nasty little machine, and it succeeds often enough, thanks to a committed cast and Franco's clean, unfussy direction. The result is a thriller of low ideological voltage, content to let its sins remain private. In the ledger of social consciousness, it sits near the cold end, which for a horror film about bad people in a nice house is not a failure. It is simply the weather.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two couples on an oceanside getaway grow suspicious that the host of their seemingly perfect rental house may be spying on them. Before long, what should have been a celebratory weekend trip turns into something far more sinister.
Questions about The Rental
Is The Rental woke?
No — The Rental is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Rental have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 20.
How does The Rental compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #143 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.