In Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 horror flick Single White Female, Jennifer Jason Leigh becomes so obsessed with Bridget Fonda she stabs her boyfriend in the eyeball with a stiletto. During The Roommate, Christian E. Christiansen’s shameless rip-off of SWF, I was inspired to inflict such an injury on myself, simply to break the unrelenting tedium. But I realised that my eyeball-gunk covered shoe might create enough publicity to encourage a sequel and I just couldn’t do that to you.
Leighton Meester plays Rebecca, a college student who’s obsessed with her roommate Sara (Minka Kelly), eventually becoming violent and unstable. Or at least that’s what the dark lighting and music tries to suggest. In reality, Meester just sulks, the offensively bland Kelly ignores her, and Cam Gigandet successfully chats up Sara by jokily threatening to date-rape her at a frat party. Apart from the lack of acting skill, it’s the scariest thing about the film.
Many horror films have overcome a deficiency of acting talent, knowing that even the blankest canvas can competently scream and writhe under showers of fake blood. But The Roommate’s 15A rating forces it to leave the gore and psychosexual aspects off-screen, depending on its director to create tension, terror and suspense. But if Christiansen understands those concepts, he’s keeping his knowledge a secret, instead falling back on cliché after cliché and bungling even basic jump-scares.
Rebecca’s psychological state also remains completely unexplored, apart from a throw-away reference to a need for medication for “either bi-polar or schizophrenia.” Neither of these disorders explains her behaviour and this insulting pseudo-medical device is as lazy and flat as the amateurish visuals, which add another facet of tedious ineptitude to this vacuum of atmosphere.
Last month’s goddawful horror The Resident left me confident that I’d seen the worst film of 2011. This month, The Roommate proved me sorely wrong. If a film comes out in May called The Landlord, I’m calling in sick.