The Roommate [ Movie Review ] ★★

The Pitch

The premise of unexpected encounters with a psychopath has been done numerous of times before. There's one with young kids (Macaulay Culkin & Elijah Wood) in The Good Son and then there's the demented nanny (Rebecca De Mornay) in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. In recent years, there's the Obsessed co worker stalker with Ali Larter and Beyoncé Knowles. Even the premise for The Roommate felt so much like a repeat of Single While Female that there are people calling this movie the Single While College Female.

Casting wise, the two female leads, Minka Kelly and Leighton Meester are relatively unknown to me. The last time I saw Minka Kelly was her turnout as Autumn in (500) Days of Summer and even in those brief moment, she was hot enough to be register in my mind. I would have probably saw Leighton Meester in Going the Distance and Date Night but it's hard to recall what were her roles in those movies.

Nevertheless, a good psychological horror can still comes from formulaic plots and unknown actors, as long as there's good handing of the materials. Let's see if these two young ladies are able to present a good psychological trauma / scare for hooking up with the wrong roommate.

The Plot

Sara Matthews (Minka Kelly) is starting her college life at ULA and it's off to a good start. Her hostel mate Tracy Morgan (Alyson Michalka) is bringing her to party and she meets up with a  fraternity house  band drummer Stephen Morterelli (Cam Gigandet). Just the type of distraction she needs to forget about her pestering ex boyfriend.

Eventually she met her new roommate Rebecca Evans (Leighton Meester) who seemed to be a quiet rich girl that enjoys the art gallery more than parties. They started to bond well and even took care of a stray kitten together. But as times goes on, Rebecca obsession with Sara started to unravel and she would goes to the extremes to keep Sara close to her. It just matter of time that Sara would find out that something is not right with her Roommate.

The Perspective

The Roommate is one suspense thriller that is not suspenseful or thrilling. It's so predictable that you could easily guess what's going to happen next. Sara thinking of moving out of the hostel due to the no kitten rule, no prize for guessing what's going to happen to the kitten. Sara's professor making a pass at her, who going to help her take revenge without her knowing. The setups for the psycho roommate to exercise her psycho way of caring were too apparent that viewers are able to guess what's coming next.

It doesn't help that Leighton Meester's rendition of a psycho roommate was pretty bland. There's nothing about her that's truly spooky or scary. She looks like a moody college student trying to look dangerous and there's hardly anything sinister about her even when she was out doing terrible things for Sara. If anyone is interested in how a freaking female psycho should be like, look for  Kathy Bates' Annie Wilkes performance in Misery.

The only highlight in this movie would be Minka Kelly. She still look as hot as she was in the few seconds of (500) Days of Summer. It's nice to have her as eye candy when the plot was so formulaic and deary. But then again, this is suppose to be a suspense drama thriller and for that, there's nothing appealing that worth recommending. It would have been better to rent the other old psychopath movies (mentioned above) instead