Renters

Two lads renting a house have trouble finding the money to pay this month’s rent.

Renters, from writer and director Adam Boland, is one in a series of online videos from him and his pals at Tax Write Off Productions and SixBananasinaKnot. You can find them on YouTube, but honestly, I wouldn’t bother. The videos are all short ten-minutes or less affairs, with very little plot and no amount of production involved across the lot of them. Renters is no different to any of the others, save for its near nine-minute runtime, and its attempt to actually involve its characters a little.

Sadly, that’s as far as it goes for good points, and Renters quickly descends into loud swearing at one another whilst drinking heavily throughout. Irish stereotypes are not done any favours when the Jameson comes out and the two main characters without names (Manley and Boland) get to thinking of a way out of their predicament. It’s quickly apparent that what they’re actually renting is one brain-cell between the two of them, and we’re forced to sit through the gamut of world-class stupid ideas before they hit upon the idea of sub-letting.

Looking at Renters, it’s as though there’s been no forethought into anything that we see on screen. The characters are just the boys playing themselves, with their dialogue being random and scattered about all over the place, and the scenario making sense to only them in their drink fuelled haze. The camera work is wild and fuzzy, losing focus all the time and always diving about from one character to the other, and the audio wasn’t thought about at all, coming through as tinny and echoey from inside the rooms. The whole thing is a complete mess and it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Renters is what happens when anybody with a phone can have a YouTube channel and call themselves filmmakers. It’s fine, and it’s bound to happen, but that doesn’t mean you should pay it any attention. There’s enough of them in their crew to suggest that they could probably do something better if they tried, but from what Renters shows us, it’s that none of them are concerned with getting any better, and that’s part of the appeal for them; just to play drunk and swear in front of the camera for a laugh.

I’m sure the team behind Renters will be glad to look back someday over the silly, badly-made videos they shot as teenagers – but for the rest of us, there’s absolutely no need for anyone else to go near it.