Movies
The Roommate
“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.”
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.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
You must be logged in to post a comment.