THE ROOMMATE

Sarah Matthews is a college freshman struggling to adjust to campus life. Sarah is assigned Rebecca as her roommate, a sweet and introverted girl who immediately becomes Sarah's accomplice in everything. As the days go by, Rebecca proves to be too intrusive and seems to have developed a near-morbid attachment to Sarah. When all the people close to Sarah start falling victim to accidents, the girl decides to end her friendship with Rebecca, but the latter turns out to be a dangerous psychopath who has no intention of abandoning her "best friend". It's strange to find a movie like "The Roommate" in the "New Arrivals" section of a video rental store and realize that it was actually produced in 2011. It's strange because "The Roommate" seems like a movie at least twenty years old, it has the look of those early evening Mediaset thrillers born in the mold of various "Fatal Attraction" or "Inserzione pericolosa" that were popular on private TV in the early 1990s. Apparently, Sonny Mallhi's script was gathering dust in the Screen Gems drawers for a few years until someone thought it appropriate to refresh the stalker thriller formula by merging it with the teen movie and a cast that exploits young faces known in the field of television serials. Screen Gems hit the mark and "The Roomate", costing around $16 million, grossed nearly 40 in the United States alone. The reason for this success is easily identifiable in the film's spot-on casting, which brought millions of young people (mostly girls, though I would say…) who are fans of "Gossip Girl", "Parenthood", "90210" and probably other youthful TV series to American theaters, and this would also explain why in Italy Sony bypassed theaters by reserving "The Roommate" for the home video market only, given the lesser appeal of the Italian public for the aforementioned series. Let's say that despite the narrative aging that automatically turns into predictability on all fronts and a strategy that targets a very specific audience not usually coinciding with that of high-tension thrillers, "The Roommate" is not a bad film. Of course, it's not a good film either, but simply one of those products that wallow in mediocrity and are ready to be forgotten at the speed of light. Everything revolves around the performances of the two leading actresses, well portrayed by Leighton Meester ("Gossip Girl"; "Monte Carlo"), who offers a rather accurate portrait of a schizophrenic psychopath, and Minka Kelly ("My Fake Wife"), who convincingly plays the role of the victim. Of course, they also included the inevitable Cam Gigandet, with his usual expressionless face from when he played the bad vampire in "Twilight", who here plays the role of the ladies' man who sleeps with Sarah, triggering Rebecca's jealousy. Also making brief appearances are the familiar faces of Billy Zane ("Titanic"), now always more relegated to little more than a cameo, and Thomas Arana ("La Chiesa", "La setta") who has been alternating with ease Italian TV fiction with star-studded blockbusters and low-budget productions for home video for a few years now. Unfortunately, "The Roommate" is a harmless thriller like a child's smile and this is a shame because by raising the age of the target audience (and maybe changing its gender), the film could have been infused with a level of eroticism that seems to want to emerge from more than one scene and which is instead visibly restrained or set aside. The homoerotic attraction that Rebecca develops for Sarah is obvious, but the film tries to conceal it, not to make it explicit, thus ruining a key to reading that could have redeemed the film. Violence and suspense are at a minimum, let's say clearly that "The Roommate" has no violence at all and that the tension develops in all in a couple of scenes, including the inevitable ambush under the shower and the final climax. Christian E. Christiansen does a clean and dignified job of directing and the entire package of the film is commendable, with a well-chosen pop soundtrack that marries wonderfully with the glossy images of the film. In general, therefore, "The Roommate" is easy to follow and is also quite pleasant, but at the same time it does not hold any surprises and resembles too many other 1990s thrillers. Negligible.