This week we will be continuing with my theme of “Gossip Girl stars appearing in mediocre-at-best films” and focusing on another lukewarm effort produced during the show’s heyday – The Roommate.
Now, let’s make one thing clear straight off the bat: 90% of The Roommate is not good. Like, really not good. I’ve seen it twice, actually, and the first time I watched it was with friends in around 2013 and we tore it to shreds. The second time I watched it was for this review because I wanted to see if my original impression of the film held up and it did. So, I repeat my statement: 90% of this film is not good.
The 10% that is good is purely Leighton Meester.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best thing about Gossip Girl was Leighton Meester. She stole every scene she was in as Blair Waldorf with perfectly timed one-liners and big brown doe-eyes, instantly weaponized in a second to produce withering glares so cutting they’d make any wanna-be Queen Bee cry and flee the Met Steps. She always straddled the line between being a genuinely sympathetic character and a villain you loved to hate, and that same quality is key to her success in The Roommate.
The film centers around Sara, brought to life in a rather snooze-worthy performance by Minka Kelly, a young woman who has just begun her first year of college. Sara meets a variety of people on her first day at her new school, including but not limited to: Tracy (Aly Michalka) – unfortunately characterised by the film as nothing more than a “party chick”, Stephen (Cam Gigandet) – essentially a gross dude-bro frat guy that Sara falls in love with (more about the film’s incredible sexism later) and, of course, Leighton Meester’s titular roommate, Rebecca.
Rebecca initially seems soft-spoken, thoughtful, creative. Meester draws us in and makes us believ that Rebecca is essentially, a perfectly fine roommate. However, just like Blair switches between sweet and calculating on a dime, so does Rebecca, and things get weird pretty quickly. As Sara and Rebecca grow closer, more and more of Rebecca’s odd and obsessive tendencies are revealed.
For example, when Sara tells Rebecca that her favourite movie is The Devil Wears Prada, she returns from a jog to find that Rebecca has put up a poster of The Devil Wears Prada in their room. Rebecca is also wearing Sara’s dead sister’s necklace (this isn’t the end of the weirdness with jewellery, either – there’s a gross scene featuring a pair of borrowed earrings and a DIY piercing session, and something terrible happens later on in the film with a belly-ring).
This is also where Meester’s acting really begins to shine. Little quirks of the brow, flashes of unexpected intensity; she does a good job of selling the unstable nature of her character.
Rebecca is, obviously, jealous of Sara’s friends, and disapproves of them. To be honest, though, so do I, because Sara’s friends, at least Tracy, are kind of jerks. Who ditches their new friend at a strange bar just to hook up with a guy because “he had a Porsche and a hot tub”?
As far as the plot goes, it’s pretty standard fare for this kind of genre (this genre being “stalker slasher roommate thriller genre.”) I won’t reveal anything but you can probably guess it pretty accurately yourself. The most important question about the plot of this kind of movie is “is it actually going to make me feel tense?”
Well, the answer to that is probably not. Overall, in terms of thrillers, it’s not the wildest thing out there. There’s one good sequence early on but it feels like it’s essentially just a rip-off of the shower scene from Psycho. I’m assuming it was meant as an homage to the classic but it just highlights the inferiority of this film.
Really, the scariest thing about The Roommate is how it treats women. The film is full of eyebrow-raising remarks and behaviour from men, for starters. Stephen, the “love interest”, purposely spills beer on Sara so he’ll have a reason to talk to her (y’know, men, a simple “hello” is fine). And then, in arguably the scariest exchange of the whole film, he also reveals that the punch served at his frat house party is spiked, and that if the frat members get a girl drunk and don’t sleep with her, they have to “pull kitchen duty for, like, a week.” He says later on that he was joking but still, uh… yikes. Later on in the film, Sara’s teacher comes onto her, and it’s implied that the only reason he let her join his class late is because he thought she was attractive. Yuck! Finally, there is a scene near the end of the film where Rebecca and another woman kiss in a club bathroom, and it’s clear that the only reason this scene is in the film is to be “provocative” and “edgy”, which is a terrible representation of same-sex interactions and a stereotype that I wish was dead and buried.
Last but most definitely not least, mental illness also gets a pretty bad rap in this film. I won’t reveal anything about the plot in case this review has sold you on seeing it, but can we please just stop using mental illness as a reason why people become villains in every single damn movie?
In conclusion, should you see The Roommate? Well, as I’ve outlined, there’s only 10% of the movie that’s actually decent, and that’s Leighton Meester’s performance. If you must watch it, watch it for that. Or, watch it with friends, like I did for the first time, and tear it to shreds.
BEST BITS:
– I’ll never get sick of watching Leighton Meester go from Bambi to Ice Queen B in 0.3 seconds.
– This film reminded me of The Temper Trap’s song Fader and how much of a banger it was. If you lived in Australia in 2011 like I did, you heard this song playing on every TV show, advert, radio station or a pink Motorola Razr all day every day.
WORST BITS:
– This film has Male Gaze written all over it. Someone pass me a barf bag.
FINAL RATING: 3/10.
