Rent-A-Pal: Parasocial

A big part of being human is a need for community and belonging. Friendship, romantic relationships, family ties (however you define family), it’s all essential to our happiness and well-being. It’s not a life-or-death thing like food or air or water, but a life without connection is a really hard one. And I think it’s something we don’t really realize the importance of until it’s missing - the inchoate discomfort that attended two years of interacting with pretty much everybody via a screen attests to that, I think. And horror examines this really well sometimes - in films I’ve written about recently, like Saint Maud, Censor, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To and May, you have protagonists whose isolation from the people around them and their struggle to connect has a serious impact on their mental health, and as often as not their attempts to reach out have terrible consequences. It may not be the flashiest of our fears, but it’s a powerful one.

And Rent-A-Pal, despite a premise that could have easily gone in a very silly direction, ends up being a creepy, restrained story of the psychological costs of loneliness and lack of connection. It’s a thoughtful, sensitive film, ultimately marred by some puzzling narrative choices.

It’s Denver, Colorado during the 1980s, and we’re introduced to David while he’s watching a videotape of a series of women, sitting in front of a plain backdrop, describing themselves and what they’re looking for in a relationship. It’s part of a video dating service that he’s signed up for. See, David’s in kind of a tough spot in his life right now - he lives at home with his mother Lucille, who is suffering from advanced dementia and needs constant supervision. His father’s been dead for some years, so David is all she has left. They get by okay on her Social Security, but it doesn’t leave him a whole lot of time to socialize. If he leaves the house for more than an hour or so, he needs to take her to the local senior citizen’s center, and that costs money.

But David has needs like anyone else. He gets lonely. And, as is so often the case, folks who are lonely and having trouble making connections on their own turn to services to help match them with people. And it’s the 1980s, at a point when VCRs have become common, commercially available technology and video cameras aren’t far behind. So video is revolutionizing what might have once been called the “lonely hearts” industry. David watches the interviews, makes notes in a little form that came with the tape. He uses one of his valuable hours out of the house to go to the video dating service, hopeful that he’s matched with someone this time. It’s been about six weeks without a single bite. No such luck this time either, though the receptionist is as optimistic and encouraging as any sales person would be.

As he’s just about to leave, he notices a tape in a large bargain-bin of miscellaneous videotapes. It’s called “Rent-A-Pal,” and it’s basically advertised as a virtual friend. Think something like a more interactive version of a recording of a Yule log. It’s a recording of someone named Andy. He’s smiling, attentive, sitting in a chair facing you. You can tell him your embarrassing stories, confess your deepest hopes and fears, and Andy will never, ever judge you.

Andy will always be there for you.

And this is what David is reduced to at this point, and what the film explores is the steadily mounting cost of his loneliness and the way a prerecorded friend may not be the healthiest solution to his predicament. The film is set, importantly, in a period when the idea of virtual connection was in its infancy. It’s not the modern day, with pervasive social media and instant communication across multiple channels. It’s analog, not digital, and the film makes much of the thump and clunk of VCRs, the way gears and capstans whir, spooling out tape, the way CRT television signals become noise, then red, green, and blue abstraction, the ratcheting of old credit card impression devices. There are lonely people in the world, trying to make connections, but the technology is as clumsy and fumbling as the people who have recourse to it to relieve their sense of isolation. It’s less conversation and more sort of hurling your attempt at connection out into the void and waiting days or weeks to hear back. It’s a conversation played back on a screen, the same way every time. You could talk to the screen, but it doesn’t actually hear you. Technology in this film is something tactile, big and clunky and ungainly without being self-conscious about it, and it describes a world where the potential for connection through technology is not nonexistent, but certainly very primitive.

And it’s a very believable world. The film does a very good job (for the most part) of painting relatable, sympathetic characters who are doing the best they can with what they have. David is fundamentally decent, trying to do right by his mother while still able to acknowledge the costs to his own life. He knows what he’s missing out on, but he isn’t going to abandon his mother. Lucille, almost totally helpless, is his entire life. She has her good days and bad days, but as David observes, they’re starting to tip more toward the bad more often. He’s all she has left, so his only real connection is with someone completely dependent on him and who as often as not isn’t even really aware of who he is or where she is. He’s 40, he lives in his mother’s basement, and any opportunity to get away for more than an hour or so costs some of the money he has to keep strictly budgeted. His comforts are few - a bottle of whiskey, a box of candy bars, some grainy old 8mm stag films when he’s sure Lucille is asleep. He spends a lot of time in front of the television.

And it would have been easy to make Lucille a caricature, a harridan abusing her henpecked son, but she isn’t. It’s clear that she’s aware on some level that she’s losing her faculties and it makes her angry and sad. She insists on trying to feed herself and breaks down when she can’t. She just wants to go for a walk and can’t. She’s in a lot of pain, and she keeps mistaking David for her late husband. Sometimes he corrects her, sometimes he plays along. Sometimes she gets angry with him, sometimes there’s real affection. It’s a demanding job, David’s not a healthcare professional and he’s doing the best he can, whether that’s enough or not. There’s resignation there, resentment, but he keeps it under wraps. For her sake. Of course, this also makes it difficult for him to really have a life or pursue relationships, and from the outside looking in, a bland, soft, middle-aged man who still lives with his mother isn’t anyone’s idea of a catch. There’s an especially painful sequence at the video dating service where you see David in all his depth and decency, but his interview segment runs too long, and what it shortens down to reduces him to something pathetic. The cards are stacked against him and you get the sense that he knows it, and it’s starting to get to him.

So you have real, sympathetic people located in a drab, workday vision of 80s suburbia. It’s a restrained, low-key setting, and the idea of a videotaped “friend” who becomes increasingly sinister could have been really jarring. It could easily be played for camp or cheated into something else, like a Freddy Krueger who springs from the television set, but the film largely plays fair with the idea just as it does with the flesh and blood characters. Andy is blandly friendly (at least to start), and the film gets a lot of mileage out of using the same footage repeatedly (since it’s a tape, committed to a specific routine)  in changing contexts to turn what was at first a little awkward into something more menacing. Early on, there’s a nice push and pull between moments where David’s interactions with Andy fall into the rhythms of an actual conversation with another person, and moments where the artificiality is laid bare, where it becomes plainly evident that Andy’s responses are canned, scripted, and will always be the same no matter how many times you rewind the tape. It’s nicely illustrative of the limitations of virtual relationships, of parasocial contact, without being too didactic about it. And as the film goes on, something starts peering through the cracks in Andy’s amiable façade - little hints at troublesome things in his past, then emotional cruelty, then obsessive, emotionally abusive behavior. It’s never clear how much of this is actually the tape and how much of it is David’s disintegrating mental state, and the film doesn’t seem especially interested in committing to one interpretation over the other, but it also never tips too far into unbelievability, so it doesn’t especially matter. There are hints and feints at Andy creeping into David’s personality and waking life, and David’s perception of the world becoming increasingly skewed. It’s underplayed enough that it isn’t over-obvious, but also maybe a little too underplayed at points. There are a couple of moments that aren’t as shocking as I think they’re meant to be because they’re so blink-and-you-miss-it.

But the biggest problem far and away with the film is its pacing and narrative flow. This is basically the story of a desperately lonely man and how his desperate, last-ditch approximation of human contact ends up going terribly awry. That’s not a new story (nor does it need to be), but it’s typically one with a specific progression, and the sequence of events here gets muddled. The first half or so of the film works very well and takes its time to build up a sense of wrongness gradually, alongside a sensitive depiction of David’s life. It’s easy to root for him, to hope that maybe just this once the horror film won’t turn into a horror film. But then at about the halfway mark, there’s a sequence - an extended montage - that you’d expect to come in the third act of the film, when the protagonist’s attempts to reach out have all been rebuffed and the final downward spiral begins. But here, it happens and then…things start to look up for David, and continue to do so. The end result is that when the bottom does drop out, it doesn’t feel earned - David’s responses don’t feel authentic or natural because they aren’t coming as the culmination of one disappointment and rejection after another. That moment happens, but then things turn around, but then it ends as if things never turned around for him. As long as the focus is on obsolete technology, it feels like a film where one of the reels got shown out of order, or a DVD where two or more chapters got played in the wrong sequence, and so the second half of the film is a more confused affair than the first and doesn’t stick the landing nearly so well as a result. I think it ends well, and in a way that makes sense for the kind of film it is, but it doesn’t feel like the logical conclusion to what we’d just seen beforehand. It should be a tragedy, where for someone like David, any rejection is world-shattering and likely to send him over the brink, but instead it’s sort of baffling - as if everything good that had happened to him didn’t matter because he was committed to his downward spiral ahead of time, and it doesn’t feel like self-sabotage or self-destructive behavior, it doesn’t emerge organically.

But on yet another hand, it’s very well-shot and edited. The director got their start as a cinematographer and editor (this is their directorial debut) and it absolutely shows. This film gets the 1980s right without being too showy about it - the interiors of David’s home are slightly dim, lit by lamps and flickering television light like any modest home of the time would be, modest period appliances and furnishings and a basement living space that combines bedroom, living room, and hastily retrofitted bathroom with a drop ceiling and exposed pipes to create an environment exactly as sad as it needs to be. The video dating service is as brightly colored and plastic as you’d expect, all primary colors, bold geometric designs, and glossily enthusiastic customer service people. There’s a wonderful moment at a skating rink that’s shot as equal parts pastel reverie and suburban Edward Hopper, and in his lowest moments, David’s world is stark and fragmented, nighttime becoming dawn in an instant, all jump cuts and harsh, unflattering light, his moments with Andy crashing down into reality in the worst possible ways. The film is full of closeups on old technology, the first glimpses into technological isolation all clunky and mechanical and covered in artificial wood grain and video signals range from clear to glitchy and noisy, eventually breaking down into pure light and color, all meaning lost. In some ways, it reminds me of how One Hour Photo mixed image and reality, though it never really commits to the conceit to the extent that film did. But its visual sense is excellent, evocative lighting and shot angles, expressive editing - the story’s beautifully told, it’s just the way it orders things that lets it down.

The performances are all solid, pitched at a relatable, human level, the dialogue is largely naturalistic, and until the very end, even Andy is a restrained menace, his wide-eyed friendliness maybe just a little too wide-eyed and the little hints that all is not right coming subtly at first and then less so. Unfortunately, apart from the confusing sequence of events, some of this subtlety is lost in the very end, things become a little too artificial, and the end drags out maybe a little too long. Which is too bad, because there’s a lot here to like, but it’s one of those cases where the shortcomings stand out even more as a result. Much like David, there’s a lot of good here, but the way the video is cut, it doesn’t come through.

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