The “stalker chick” sub-genre as we know it today first began back in 1971 with Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me, in which an attractive but dangerously unbalanced woman mercilessly hounds a disc jockey after he discards her for another woman. Since that film’s considerable commercial success we’ve seen endless variations on the sub-genre over the years: Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy, Swimfan, Obsessed…all of them featuring seductive, vengeful (almost uniformly blonde) Medeas whose desire to possess another that they can’t have – usually a man – steamrolls over all other considerations and always winds up leading to terrible things.
The latest offering in this stalwart sub-genre now comes in the form of director Christian E. Christiansen’s The Roommate, which actually owes more to the 1992 Bridget Fonda/Jennifer Jason Leigh thriller Single White Female than any of the above-mentioned titles. The story follows Sara (Minka Kelly), a beautiful college freshman whose new roommate Rebecca (Leighton Meester) forms a malignant obsession with her and ultimately plots to drive away and/or kill every other person she attempts to form a relationship with. These unfortunate souls include Tracy (Aly Michalka), a ringlet-tressed party animal who suffers an unfortunate incident with Rebecca in the dorm showers, and Stephen (Cam Gigandet, who’s clearly never met a muggy reaction shot he didn’t like), an impossibly good-looking fraternity brother with romantic designs on Sara.
Not that Sara doesn’t have baggage of her own, particularly in the form of a deceased older sister – whose name she had tattooed above her left breast (why yes, that does factor in later!) – as well as a high school boyfriend (Matt Lanter, direct from the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog) who reneged on an agreement to attend the (fictional) “University of Los Angeles” with Sara and opted instead for a last-minute slot at Brown.
The two girls form a fairly close friendship at first, in the process revealing the intimate details of their respective pasts and – in Sara’s case – unknowingly providing the mentally unglued Rebecca ample ammunition to use against her later on. Meester, who crafts a performance that harkens back to Alicia Silverstone’s in the similar 1993 thriller The Crush (the two actresses actually look quite a bit alike on screen), gets the job done sufficiently, if unremarkably, nailing the stone-cold gaze and frantic desperation required of the part but minus the subtle shading that would’ve made it a truly memorable piece of work (a la Glenn Close’s deranged-but-sympathetic turn in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction). Kelly, tasked with inhabiting an arguably less difficult role, gives a fine performance as the bedeviled young Sara, whose suspicions mount – though of course not near as quickly as they should, given the genre – as Rebecca begins exhibiting behavior that grows more and more bizarre with each imagined slight.
But it wouldn’t be fair to criticize Meester’s performance, however lightly, without also putting it in the context of screenwriter Sony Mallhi’s shallow script, which is like a paint-by-numbers version of every “disturbed woman” thriller produced in the last 30 years. Given that, it’s no surprise that the scribe hails from an executive background, having written the script “on spec” under a pseudonym while working as EVP at the genre-friendly production shingle Vertigo Films. No surprise because The Roommate is the epitome of risk-averse studio filmmaking, a toothless retread of other, better films that might as well have been dictated by committee for all the difference it would’ve made. This is “model-home” screenwriting at its best (worst?) – efficient and functional, but also blandly impersonal, scrubbed of all individuality and more than a little cold. Where Mallhi should have taken far more care to delve into the vulnerable psychology underpinning these two damaged women, he instead substitutes mind-numbingly obvious expository dialogue at every turn. Take, for example, the revelation of the “dead-sister” subplot, delivered in the following, laughably rote (paraphrased), exchange between Sara and Rebecca outside a tattoo parlor:
Rebecca: Yuck, tattoos. No thank you.
Sara: [looking a little hurt] I have a tattoo.
Rebecca: Oh, I’m sorry. What is it?
Sara: [pulling down the corner of her blouse and revealing a tattoo of the name “Emily” above her left breast] It’s my sister’s name. She died when I was nine.
Rebecca: I’m sorry. I didn’t know.
Sara: That’s ok.
END SCENE
Indeed, that’s only one example among many in which character motivations and tortured back stories are boiled down to a few lines of programmatic dialogue that literally sounds as if it were hashed out in a wood-paneled conference room by a group of creatively bankrupt studio executives, which when you think about it really isn’t too far from the truth (although in this case, it only took one). Then again, this is a Screen Gems film; slot-filling teen thrillers are the company’s stock in trade, and Mallhi at least deserves credit for being savvy enough to recognize the formula and enterprising enough to slap a script together approximating it, all while juggling a day job in an industry known for its horrifically long hours and grueling work load.
But that isn’t nearly enough to let him off the hook, particularly when it comes to some of The Roommate’s more forehead-slapping lapses in logic, as when Rebecca brutally assaults Tracy in the showers and the victimized girl simply switches dorms instead of, you know, actually filing a police report. Or how about the scene where Rebecca claims to have been brutally assaulted (though she actually inflicted the wounds, including a nasty knife slash across the abdomen, herself) and Sara, who this entire time we’ve been led to believe is a young woman in possession of a level head and relative smarts, agrees not to alert the authorities after Rebecca swears her to secrecy. Um…I’m sorry, but in what universe? Did they run out of budget for cop extras or something? Doubtful. More likely it’s a case of lazy screenwriting.
So after all this bitching you might reasonably find yourself wondering how exactly I came to award The Roommate a relatively decent 5/10 rating. My answer? Because it delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more. Unlike, say, the 2009 Stepfather remake (starring Meester’s Gossip Girl co-star Penn Bagdley), which somehow didn’t even manage to clear the incredibly low bar that had been set for it, The Roommate actually isn’t terrible. Christiansen, the Oscar-nominated (for his live-action short Om natten) Danish director making his English-language debut with the film, doesn’t bring anything particularly dynamic to the table but nevertheless delivers a handsomely-shot, mildly diverting production that should at least help guarantee him more opportunities down that golden-paved Hollywood road in the future (particularly if the film manages to hit its target demo).
At the end of the day, The Roommate is a relatively harmless cotton candy distraction for the under-17 set – a spit-shined, superficially effective teen-oriented flick (though starring actors in some cases a decade older than their college-age characters) of the type Tinseltown has been cynically churning out for the last several decades now. In this grand tradition of mediocrity, a 5/10 is quite frankly exactly the rating the filmmakers were asking for, and hence exactly the rating their movie deserves.