Room For Rent is a 2019 thriller about a lonely widow, who rents out a room and becomes dangerously obsessed with one of her guests.
There’s a moment early in Tommy Stovall‘s Room For Rent that is hard to watch, where young men accost an older woman, one in particular afflicting some rather distasteful behavior that is both unsettling and admittedly hard to believe though no doubt such things must happen. It’s awkwardly uncomfortable for that reason alone, but so is a lot that happens in this oddly creepy tale of obsession that features a truly twisted turn from it star stuck in a plot that has been out in the sun for far too long.
Joyce (Lin Shaye) is an older woman, recently widowed from a husband we discover may not have been all that devoted. How much so? Well, she stores his ashes in the same drawer he kept his girlie magazines. Now in debt and needing money, Joyce turns her large home into a bed and breakfast, learning early that not all guests are kind. Soon enough, she’s got a new tenant, a young man named Bob (Oliver Rayon), who is rather mysterious but asks no questions and is looking to make it a long-term stay. Longing for companionship and feeling denied real romance all her life, she clings to the ideal of Bob and slips into a kind of madness in earning his attention.
Room For Rent is a bit of a dark fairy tale with an admittedly odd twist in putting Shaye in the role of the obsessive type, one usually reserved for young misguided girls sexually confused about an older man. That leaves Shaye prancing about in clothes meant for women forty years younger, slapping on layers of cosmetics and doing up her hair in big ribbons and flowers, dressing the part of the single white female lusting for action. It’s decidedly weird mixing a saddening story of an aging lonely woman and that of deadly infatuation. But that’s what this is.
Things move pretty fast with Stovall and screenwriter Stuart Flack wasting no time in getting to the crazy with Joyce a woman clearly left of center from the start. While the film never really explores the origins of that, there are at least hints to why she’s become so jaded and raw, with Shaye just whacky enough to keep it entertaining. There’s little else going on though with Bob a cardboard figure that feels set up to be something more impactful but never coming to significance. So too with Sarah (Valeska Miller), a young woman who befriends and innocently betrays Joyce, blandly coming and going without much resonance.
Either way, this is Shaye’s show, doing what she can in giving Joyce some depth. Joyce is a tragedy, frayed and broken long before we get to know her. She’s crippled by her insecurities and staggering loneliness, stemming from a loss that ultimately damaged her. Shaye finds all kinds of awkward eeriness in the few subtleties she’s provided, creating a mostly memorable spin on an old thread, making her entirely the reason to give this otherwise generic movie a look.
Not a horror movie, not a black comedy, not a thriller, not even a psychological drama, Room For Rent is a static experience, lacking any zest for mystery, danger, or suspense, its ending not ambiguous but also not very satisfying. I suppose the whole point is it’s trying to be unconventional, but it never innovates beyond casting Shaye, keeping it a simple curiosity that loses favor not long after it ends.