Written and directed by Jon Stevenson
Starring Wil Wheaton, Brian Landis Folkins and Amy Rutledge
Running time: 1 hour and 48 minutes

Exploring the Horror of Connection/Obsession in Rent-A-Pal

by Nikk Nelson 

When my filmpal Rosalie Kicks sent out a call for this review, I saw two words: Wil Wheaton. My sort of obsession with Wil Wheaton has been documented before in one of the first pieces I ever wrote for Movie Jawn. Did you know he regularly records audiobooks? He’s also a fiction writer, no big deal, renaissance man and national treasure but whatever. Had another contributor snagged this opportunity, I would have had to fight them, Matilda (1978)-boxing style—float like a kangaroo and sting like, um, one too. But it’s all mine. It turns out, my territoriality conveniently lent itself thematically to writer, director and editor Jon Stevenson’s feature debut, Rent-A-Pal (2020). It was love at first frame for me—the opening credits and synthpop score alone, I knew I was in for a treat. In the circles I circle, during conversations about independent film companies, A24 gets brought up most often as the current gold standard. All due respect to them but I would put IFC and its genre arm, IFC Midnight, up against anything A24 has to offer. If I wasn’t sold before with films like Beyond the Gates (2016), I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016), and Carnage Park (2016), then Rent-A-Pal (2020) definitely sealed it for me. 

The film follows David, played in an absolutely chilling performance by Brian Landis Folkins who doubled as producer of the film—a lonely, hopeless romantic caring for his elderly mother, Lucille—Kathleen Brady in an equally stunning turn opposite Folkins. Set in the mid-to-late eighties, the film opens with David trying his luck with a dating service, Video Rendezvous. Imagine something like Tinder or Bumble but each profile is a VHS tape you’d essentially rent, watch and then return with a list of the people you were interested in matching with. After a long stretch with no responses from potential partners, our lonesome hero stumbles across a tape in the Video Rendezvous bargain bin—Rent-A-Pal. 

David goes home, pours some booze, pops the tape in and is introduced to Andy (Wil Wheaton *squee*) who would like to be friends. The character reminds me of a younger, demented Mr. Rogers. The actual content of the tape feels a bit like a self-help seminar with Andy as your host. Without spoiling anything, what follows is a terrifying meditation on loneliness, isolation, obsession and the ensuing horror of those concepts as routine. As David navigates caring for his deteriorating mother amid finally matching with a potential soulmate, too good to be true Lisa, perfectly captured by Amy Rutledge, his relationship with Andy takes a dark and surreal turn. Without meaning to, I’m sure, Jon Stevenson turned in the perfect film for lockdown in 2020. To be honest, a lonely man sitting in his basement, drinking whiskey and re-watching the same video over and over and over again hit a little too close to home, no pun intended. Watching it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite, actually A24 offerings, The End of the Tour (2015), a biopic of writer David Foster Wallace. 

A film that also deeply explores loneliness, one of my favorite moments that seemed to connect the David in that film to the David in this one comes when, talking about humanity’s relationship with technology and intimacy, Jason Segel as Foster Wallace says, “As the Internet grows in the next ten, fifteen years and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don't know about you, I'm gonna have to leave the planet. 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone, with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us, but want our money. And that's fine, in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die…” Rent-A-Pal (2020) explores the absolute horror of this as worst case scenario. And the only comfort it offers is, as much as we would like to believe in the unprecedentedness of technology in our age, what we have, really isn’t anything new. 

The eighties and nineties are coming back. It seems like every independent horror film these days is set in that era. Everyone’s got the VHS look and feel. Everybody synthpop. But there’s something truly special about the look and feel of Rent-A-Pal (2020). Everything, from the furniture to the tech to the mom jeans—it’s all here and is pulled off in such a way that the immersion, impressive on its own, is used to even further develop the film’s sense of utter isolation. It’s a trick that even seasoned filmmakers, especially in the horror genre, often either ignore completely or can’t quite pull off, and the fact that Jon Stevenson did so in his debut (thanks in no small part I’m sure to production designer Brandon Fryman), speaks to a potentially brilliant career delivering legitimately impressive filmmaking. A lot of independent filmmakers attempt to make a film so completely beyond their means that it makes the inherent limitations of low-budget filmmaking that much more glaring in the ultimate result. Jon Stevenson, and the cast and crew of Rent-A-Pal (2020) prove, as John Carpenter did with Halloween (1978), that there’s a difference between doing the best you can with what you have and taking what you have and bringing out the best in it. The emotional toll may keep me from ever revisiting this one. But I will recommend it for the rest of my life.   

It’s in select thaters and On Demand September 11th.--To lead in or to follow nicely, I would recommend again an IFC Midnight favorite mentioned above, Beyond the Gates (2016), One Hour Photo (2002), or another feature debut I was equally impressed with, Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party (2007)--