AH, YES, NOW this is the real thing. We have, already this year, had our fair share of terrible films, but The Roommate – Single White Femalewith a frontal lobotomy – maps out previously unchartered territories of rampaging wretchedness.
The representation of mental illness is offensive to a near criminal degree. The actors break new ground in avant-garde inexpressiveness. And Billy Zane plays a professor of fashion.
Watching The Roommateis, however, not an altogether dispiriting experience. As the magnificent poison seeps through your eyes and ears, everything you've previously heard or seen suddenly seems that bit more vivid and delicious. Ill-remembered clouds brim with sunshine. The music of Daniel O'Donnell starts to sound invigoratingly challenging. Bailed-out bankers appear sweetly benevolent.
You could, of course, get the same surge from smashing your head repeatedly with a boulder, but then you wouldn’t get to see Billy Zane play a professor of fashion.
The film follows the misadventures of Sara, a blandly beautiful student (Minka Kelly). When she first encounters Rebecca (Leighton Meester), her new roommate, we are, one imagines, expected to remark on the eerie similarity between their appearances. They do look alike. Then again, everybody at this fictional university (any genuine third-level institution would sue) has the same gleaming hair, the same off-the-peg nose and the same rigid mannequin pout.
Rebecca is, of course, suffering from full-blown, clinical barminess. Before too long she’s brandishing knives, shrieking malevolently and, in one moment that must be spoilt, flinging blameless kittens into tumble driers.
In decades to come, The Roommatemay, perhaps, be held up as an indicator of what went wrong with western society in the years before its final decline into barbarism. Every aspect of the picture – its lazy pacing, its disdain for meaningful education, its taste for empty dialogue – is overpowered by an inclination towards neutered style. Come to think of it, one can imagine 23rd-century Billy Zane lecturing on the film to his tinfoil-clad students.
He’s a professor of fashion, you know.
