Room for Rent
(Canada, 89 min.)
Written and directed by Matthew Atkinson
Starring: Mark Little, Brett Gelman, Mark
McKinney, Carla Gallo, Stephnie Weir
Living with random roommates is an
experience that everyone should face at least once, if only to appreciate how
normal and kind one’s friends and family are. For example, when I moved to
Toronto, I answered a Craig’s List ad for a house that was led by someone who
seemed perfectly chill and relatable. She turned out to be a batshit crazy
hoarder who cleaned the shower for an hour every week (usually at midnight) and ran an amateur
massage studio out of our messy living room—an expected everybody to vamoosh
when her clients arrived. Not the most pleasant year, but it gave some
perspective.
A prospective tenant, Carl (Brett Gelman),
appears in a flash and seems practically perfect in every way. Carl is like the
son that Warren and Betty always wanted. He works, he’s polite, he’s tidy, and
he gets out of the house every now and then. A rivalry ensues as Mitch falls
from being the favourite of his parents’ affection, although he presumably only
was by default. As Carl incessantly works his way into the family’s fabric,
including planning an extravagant retirement party for Warren and enlisting
Mitch’s ex-girlfriend from high school (Carla Gallo) to do so, Mitch pushes back
to discover the truth about Carl. Cue a stink bomb, a leaky waterbed, and some
life-changing revelations.
Little and Gelman have a lot of fun
creating the bitter feud between the two roommates. Gelman is amusingly creepy
playing Carl like a psychotic Mary Poppins. Little plays a downbeat and
disaffected anti-hero who recalls a young Don McKellar, although both Mitch and
Carl could easily fuel a storyline on Twitch
City. They create a weird dynamic akin to sibling rivalry as the two adult-aged
boys antagonize one another, playing sweet angels whenever the parents are
around and being petty doofuses whenever they’re absent.
Room
for Rent never goes for big laughs, but the modesty
of the film’s humour lets writer/director Matthew Atkinson keep an even hand on
the film’s purposefully awkward tone. This is one of those movies where
audiences are more likely to cringe than let out a belly laugh, if only because
they’ve all been there. And with housing prices as prohibitively expensive as
they are, we’re all likely to be there again.
Room for Rent opens in Toronto on Oct. 26.