“The Roommate” had all of the makings to become a college cult classic.
For those who had randomly assigned roommates coming into freshman year, you may remember the questions you had. Are we going to get along? Is he or she going to be weird? Is he or she going to have the same interests as me?
Well, “The Roommate” could’ve had thousands of incoming college freshmen questioning “Is he or she going to try and kill me?”
But the only real question the film leaves is “Can I have my time and money back?”
Operating in a sea of stereotypes and ripped off themes from other movies, “The Roommate” revolves around a small town girl, Sara, from Des Moines, Iowa, who moves to Los Angeles to attend a fictional college to pursue a career in fashion.
Sara (Minka Kelly), with all of her small-town hopes and simple aspirations, comes into contact with her roommate Rebecca (Leighton Meester).
Sara is exposed to the Los Angeles lifestyle through Rebecca, who seems like a worthy friend willing to show the rich, big city lifestyle to a small-town girl.
This spirals out of control when Sara realizes Rebecca is an obsessive personality who is mentally unstable and not taking her medicine.
When Sara meets a boy and has experiences away from Rebecca, Rebecca turns psychotic and does thriller-type murderous and dangerous things.
Like many underdeveloped thrillers, “The Roommate” takes 20 minutes to introduce its plot and then shows unbelievable filler to hold the viewer’s attention for the remaining hour of the film — though the remaining hour feels like more than that.
The movie ends with the pervading image that this in no way could ever happen, not because it’s highly unlikely, but because the environment created by the film is so fake and not remotely college.
Danish filmmaker Christian E. Christiansen accomplishes this amazingly fake feeling by creating a cast full of beautiful people who could only be actors or models.
Their experience in the early minutes of the movie only add to the embellished Hollywood stereotypes of what we thought college was when we were 15 years old.
Although these aspects of the film come off as annoying, the real part of the film that makes it utterly unwatchable is the lack of explanation.
The characters have no backstory to why they act the way they do.
Rebecca’s unstable mental state brought on by her not taking her medication is never explained, nor is her obsessive personality.
The aspects are more or less thrown in at random, assuming the viewer is going to have a concept of what it means.
This lack of storytelling is entirely ditched in the second half of the film, which is just a shell of an attempt to add suspense to characters that don’t really make sense.
“The Roommate” simply isn’t good. It’s a good way to get your real life roommate to hate you if you make them go see this movie.
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