Joyce is a lonely widow who needs money to keep her home, so she rents out a room. After trying to run a bed and breakfast, she later decides to have an ongoing tenant: a mysterious drifter named Bob.

Soon, she's making him the object of her deepest romantic fantasies. Yet when Bob falls for one of her younger friends, she decides to finally get everything she ever wanted no matter what it takes.

You may know Lin Shaye from the Insidious films, but here, she's gripping the spotlight all for herself. There are some great character moments, like when she attacks a gang of skateboarders by kissing one of their members right on the mouth or her flipping out and suffocating a friend with a throw pillow. I get the idea that Shaye is overjoyed to be a bad guy here, reveling in the ridiculous wardrobe and over the top melodrama.

I mean, what other movie will you see where Lin has a near-erotic moment as she brushes her teeth with the toothbrush of Bob, her drug-dealing fistfighting love interest? Or finds a bag of cocaine and does huge handfuls of it before dragging a dead body across her bric-a-brac festooned living room?

I laughed out loud several times during this and even if the ending is a little choppy, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Room for Rent opens May 3 in select theaters and releases May 7 on VOD.

This 2019 thriller stars Lin Shaye, Oliver Rayon and Valeska Miller. Shaye (Insidious) plays Joyce, a lonely yet disturbed, widow who decides to open a bed & breakfast in her home. She meets a young woman, Sarah (Miller) whom she befriends and soon Joyce meets Bob (Rayon),a handsome loner whom she becomes obsessed with. Joyce wants the life she never had with a baby and will take extreme measures if anyone gets in her way. This isn't bad, it has dramatic & tense moments and Shaye is great as usual. Give this one a try if you're into psychological thrillers.

'Room for rent' is astoundingly depressing, terribly awkward, and unremittingly creepy, to the point of being absolutely cringe-worthy through and through. Absorbing as it is, the terms "low-key" and "slow-burn" feel too charged to describe the purposefully slothful pace and subdued tone that the feature maintains from start to finish. Whatever genre labels one may wish to apply, it's a portrait of a deeply unwell, desperately lonely woman who will go to extraordinary lengths to construct and maintain the hopeful image of the life she wants to have. It feels vaguely familiar in some ways, except that any comparable title would be saturated with substantially more blood and violence and find the "horror" tag readily applicable. This instead emphatically strips away nearly all overtness, almost becoming more of a character study while nonetheless mirroring the trajectory of a thriller.

All due credit to screenwriter Stuart Flack for developing complex, whole characters and a narrative that's captivating despite its simplicity and self-constraint. Tightly controlled as the film is, its success depends in large part on his writing - and on the actors selling his product. Thankfully, I think everyone on hand is very much up to the task, the primary players most of all. Oliver Rayón's role as Bob is maybe slightly underwritten, frankly mostly serving as a plot device, but Rayón nonetheless portrays the tenant with a steadiness that makes me curious to see him in other features. Much more noteworthy is Valeska Miller, bringing natural charm and poise to her major supporting part as Sarah. Hers is a character requiring a measure of range and strength of personality, and I think Miller manages it very capably; I'd very much like to watch her take on a more prominent, dramatic role, as I think she'd be super.

Above all, though, 'Room for rent' is essentially a vehicle for Lin Shaye, and I'd be lying if I said I weren't impressed. I recognize among her credits a number of movies I've seen - some I've enjoyed, others not so much. Here she very effectively demonstrates her skills in a lead role demanding significant nuance, range, and forcefulness. Whether the immediate tenor of a scene is one of sullenness, outrage, kinship, pride, discord, tenacity, or anything else, Shaye's presence is commanding. She deftly shifts between between every varied, conflicting mood of a character that does the most to concretely embody broad themes of solitude, manipulation, avarice, deceit, and wish fulfillment. It's an outstanding performance well off the beaten track from the industry spotlight, but certainly deserving of much more attention.

It's one matter to say a film causes one to flinch, but usually it's because of content that's viscerally repulsive in one way or another. In 'Room for rent' that reaction is strictly on account of the multiple distressing sentiments the feature imparts, which I suppose is notable in and of itself. As strongly as the movie focuses on protagonist Joyce and the extremes she goes to, it's not wrong to call this a psychological thriller, and in the most underhanded, unconventional fashion, I would also contend that 'Room for rent' fits the bill of horror. Yet to the extent that it's a thriller, it's only in the most muted and discreet of ways as we see everything Joyce does or intends. To the extent that it could be considered horror, it's in the most high-minded and esoteric sense, in which Joyce is an unpleasant, unwelcome reflection of the viewer's own fears: about how others perceive us; about our mortality, lucidity, relevance, regrets, self-reliance, legacy; about our fragility - and about what we may have to do if any part of ourselves is threatened.

Though rife with palpable tension, the movie thoroughly downplays every story beat in sustenance of its pointedly hushed, arguably minimalist approach. By no means is this a film that wide audiences may enjoy; only viewers receptive to the most direly (figuratively) soft-spoken of features are likely to find favor here. For that matter, there's no question that the movie dances a very, very fine line between "subtle" and "lacking." All I can say is that I, for one, find 'Room for rent' to be a swell picture characterized by superb performances and magnificent, delicate tact in its screenplay, and I'm so very pleased that I came across this.