Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Rent-A-Pal’ on Hulu, Where A Lonely Guy Gets Played By A Villain On Tape

The IFC Midnight-affiliated indie Rent-A-Pal (Amazon Prime) gets great performances out of its leads, Brian Landis Folkins and Wil Wheaton, as two men locked in a warped friendship of need and shared grievance, even though one of them only exists on VHS. 

RENT-A-PAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Denver, 1990. A 40ish man named David (Brian Landis Folkins) still lives at home, where he provides 24-hour care for his mother, who is elderly and suffers from dementia. David is lonely. Really lonely. But six months of pouring cash into Video Rendezvous has produced exactly zero dates, and David wonders whether the cheery, patronizing matchmaking-via-videotape service is just jerking his chain. One day he discovers a tape in the bargain bin down at VR’s HQ. “Meet your new best friend, Andy,” the cover art for Rent-A-Pal reads. “He listens to you, he understands you.” David takes the tape home and pops it into his top-loading VCR. The image whirs to life, and Andy appears. With his bearded moon face and cream-colored sweater vest, Wil Wheaton’s Andy is a combo meal of amiability and vague, unsettled threat.

David begins responding to Andy’s prompts almost despite himself. “Can I take a look at your place?” Andy says, and leans forward, seeming to peer past the Trinitron’s environs. “Hey, nice digs!” And David instinctively hides his bottle of bourbon from his new friend’s aperture grilled gaze. Andy shares an embarrassing story from his childhood; he grouses about how domineering mothers can be. “Do you have a girlfriend?” Andy suddenly asks, and his pause is calculated to be both pitying and ingratiating when David (or any lonely man like him who engages with Rent-A-Pal) inevitably responds in the negative.

Andy eggs on David’s dissatisfaction with having to care for his deteriorating mother. He sympathizes with his frustrations over the women who dismiss him. “She missed out on a date with you, pal.” Finally, Andy twists David’s repression into a dark desire for more. “You’re entitled to the things you want.” David eventually finds a potential match through the Video Rendezvous service, but by then he’s been drawn ever deeper into his cathode-ray codependency with Andy. Something’s gotta give.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In its play with the threshold between technology, the mind, and reality, Rent-A-Pal offers flickers of Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory 1983 body horror classic. And while it flirts with thriller elements, Rent-A-Pal goes full horror movie in its final throes, aligning it with the similar amalgam in Adam Wingard’s brilliant 2015 film The Guest, where Dan Stevens has the same gravitational pull on his victims as Andy does over David.

Performance Worth Watching: As the titular pal on the tube, Wil Wheaton builds Andy from a mixture of bizarre displacement (a telephone phone rings next to him; it goes unanswered), genial appeasement of David, and flashes of outright menace that bring his analog villain to life.

Memorable Dialogue: Andy manipulates David’s desire for companionship. He’s on tape, offering timed responses, and controlled by remote. But his affirmations are the feedback loop David needs to feel valued. “Our friendship, our…connection, that’s real, pal! That’s as real as it gets!” Andy says through a haze of oscillating vertical hold.

Sex and Skin: Late at night, after he’s put his mother to bed, David watches the ancient porn filmstrips his dead father left behind.

Our Take: The clunky technology of the 1980s and 90s is a means to an end in Rent-A-Pal, and offers a survey of how we seek out connection in our contemporary world. There are no swipes right or left, and instead it’s fast forward and reverse. There are answering machine messages, not direct messages. And the community David’s lonely man discovers isn’t online, it’s on tape. Andy is one ally against a world that has shut him out. So what if he’s on VHS? Is that any different than the anonymity of constructed avatars in chat rooms? Andy is the manifestation David’s damaged male ego craves, and Rent-A-Pal, steeped in the tech of a previous era, still expertly skewers the toxic masculinity of today, fed by social media and online communities, that rewards rage and twists the frayed nerve endings of emotional deficiency into a sharp-edged weapon.

As David’s loneliness and desperation consume him, it becomes psychosis, and Rent-A-Pal finds ways to represent his damaged mental perspective as a confused mix of live, Memorex, and dark twisted fantasy. His treasured photo with the father who left him behind becomes a real-world selfie with his new buddy Andy, and we know that David’s mind has finally left him. That sets up the film’s very bloody finale, and even if it is a little truncated, we can believe it, since David has spent the last half-hour denying the promise of an IRL relationship in favor of hugging the manipulating techno-villain Andy through the convex glass of his TV screen.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Rent-A-Pal builds a claustrophobic world of era-specific appliances and, ultimately, techno-horror as it dwells on loneliness, desire, and poisonous male relationships.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Stream Rent-A-Pal on Hulu