The Roommate

Roommates can be such a pain. When they’re not eating your food or borrowing your stuff without asking, they’re putting your pets in the tumble dryer and slicing up your ex-lovers with a Stanley knife. In this dorm-room spin on ‘Single White Female’, bland beauty Sarah (Minka Kelly) slowly realises that her roomie, Rebecca (Leighton Meester), has become dangerously enamoured of her. Meester plays this mousy maniac as a clingy nuisance; apart from eruptions of violent rage, she acts like a jealous girlfriend, chastising the object of her obsession for staying out too late and not returning her phone calls. Where’s a real femme fatale like Jennifer Jason Leigh when you need her? The film banks on its target audience being titillated and creeped out by lesbian desire: director Christian E Christiansen stages the obligatory makeout session after a full hour of milking Meester’s stares for maximum discomfort. This is trash of the tamest variety which elicits a few mild shudders at most.