Review: THE ROOMMATE - Evict This Single White Female Knock-Off
rating: 2
Watching films, in an ideal world, should always come down to face value. If you start making excuses then you already know somethings gone awry somewhere in the frame. Of course in film-making not every production is made to appeal to everyone you cant forget the marketers all-important touchstone of the target audience so in reality there has to be a little bit of context, and in this case I fully admit this film wasnt particularly made for me. Unfortunately in certain cases, context, demographics and all the market research in the world cant hide the moment when all that effort falls flat on its face. And thats The Roommate pretty much in a nutshell. Minka Kelly is Sara, a supposedly talented design student from the mid-west who arrives in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles and the crazy campus life of college, perfectly represented on her first day by a couple of equally attractive dorm mates, and a booze-filled party at a frat house which seems to be the community abode of Americas Next Top Model. She swaps admiring glances with the incumbent bands drummer Stephen (Cam Gigandet), who in a character defining moment of decency, spills beer down her front in order to talk to her, and then noticing her somewhat inebriated state tells her shes been drinking laced punch and then helps her back to her digs. Only to the lift of course. In her room we get our first glimpse of the roommate, Rebecca (Leighton Meester the saucer-eyed alum of Gossip Girl), who the next day wastes no time in greeting Sara with a megawatt smile that suggests imbalance rather than overt friendliness, and further displays an immediately concerning personality with barely hidden resentment of Saras other friends. Its patently clear Rebecca doesnt like to play with others. Others who dont share her room anyway. Which is The Roomates immediate, and primary problem; everything is far too obvious, the only tension coming from what clichéd crazy behaviour is going to crop up next. Its less a study of alienation and obsession, and more a Saturday night drinking game.
Inevitably Saras horizons expand to her studies, to a designer friend off-campus, to hunky Stephen, as Rebeccas contract to her single-minded determination to keep Sara to herself, to protect her from the evils of the world. Admittedly she does have a point with the unintentionally hilarious casting of Billy Zane as a professor of fashion design, who admires pretty students as well as pretty clothes. Its hard to keep a straight face when he declares he loves the danger in Saras work as we look at a drawing of a woman in a red cocktail dress wearing a nurses hat. Sara, naturally, remains oblivious to Rebeccas psychotic machinations, even when shes taken to an art gallery and shown Rebeccas favourite piece which may as well have been called I like this painting Im crazy. A subsequent visit to Rebeccas palatial LA house for Thanksgiving puts it in all in inescapable black and white when her mother asks Is she taking her meds?, and she experiences ground zero of Rebeccas equally fractious past. Finally moving out of their dorm-room domesticity Sara experiences Rebecca going from simmering lunacy to outright violence. Even Stephen gets up to speed as they investigate the anti-psychotic she hasnt been taking, I just thought she was weird, he says. Its difficult to pinpoint exactly where the blame for The Roommates unintended humour and mediocrity lays, but the writing is a good place to start. Any film that has two characters walk into the worlds most obvious modern art gallery and have one of them say these are the modern pieces needs some serious approbation. Its outright theft of a scene from Single White Female needs something akin to a literary slap. 
The actors go through the motions, but in truth they dont have much to work with. Youre not going to get detailed character development out of a psycho-thriller with a 90 minute running time. Cam Gigandet comes out as the best of the bunch, based purely on his permanent expression of having been woken up somewhere unexpected. The Danish director, Christian E Christiansen, was Oscar-nominated for his short feature Råzone, and you wonder what his thoughts are on his first foray into American cinema. Near the beginning of the The Roommate he makes a reference to his previous film, by naming the campus café after it. Maybe he figured it was just an amusing in-joke, or maybe it was a note of nostalgia for better days. 
The Roommate is released in the U.K. today.