The Roommate Review: Not As Scary As Co-ed Dorm Bathrooms

I made a crucial mistake when planning to see The Roommate for this Poptimal review- I decided to go to an 8:00 pm showing, on a Friday night, at a theater next to a high school. That meant that I was forced to share the experience with a theater full of loud, obnoxious, and upsettingly foul-mouthed teenagers. The fact that the most entertaining part of the whole movie was listening to two rival teenage factions tell each other to shut up says more about the quality of The Roommate than I could ever hope to in this short review.

Minka Kelly and Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester star in this college thriller, which tells the story of a mentally unstable college freshman (Meester) who becomes obsessed with her new roommate (Kelly) and ends up trying to take down anyone who comes between them. If you think you’ve seen this movie before, you have. It was called Single White Female and it came out in 1992.

The Roommate must have been made during a long CW filming hiatus, because every CW show from One Tree Hill to The Vampire Diaries was represented in the cast. Despite the teen star power, The Roommate fell hopelessly flat. In the interest of full disclosure, it is important to admit that I am not a scary movie fan, mostly because any slightly scary moment in the mildest of thrillers causes my heart to pound out of my body in terror. I avoid scary movies because I can’t handle them. In other words, I’m a wuss and everything scares me. Everything except The Roommate.

This thriller was less than thrilling. Meester did her best to seem creepy and deranged throughout the flick, but her sinister looks at the camera and bizarre stares at herself in the mirror had most of the theater laughing at moments that were obviously supposed to be disturbing. Besides that, she was simply too good looking to be believably terrifying. Kelly did fine as the object of Meester’s obsession, but her character was desperately one-dimensional. The rest of the characters weren’t much better. In fact, of the many characters that meet less than pleasant fates, I was most concerned for the adorable kitten the girls adopted in the beginning of the film.

The scariest of moments in The Roommate weren’t ones of suspense and foreboding. Instead, the scenes that elicited the most heart pounding responses were the ones that made the audience wince from the sight of blood. These were actually some of the best parts of the film because the wounds were familiar and imaginable instead of over-the-top disgusting, making them all the more cringe inducing. At one point, Meester pierced her own ears with a pair of borrowed earrings. All of the girls in the theater immediately shut their eyes and clutched at their earlobes imagining the pain. It was the first scene that managed to induce an appropriately disturbed reaction from the crowd.

Other than these bloody moments, there was little to actually thrill the audience. The Roommate was essentially lackluster, halfhearted, and forgettable. If you’re desperate for a roommate-themed psychological thriller, rent Single White Female. If you’re desperate for Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly, watch Gossip Girl or Friday Night Lights. Just make sure to save your money and skip The Roommate. And whatever you do, don’t go see it with a hundred high school students.

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures