I went into this movie knowing three things.

1. It was about life in a college dorm.
2. It looked scary.
3. It starred Leighton Meester.

The second item on that list very nearly overcame my tendency to watch anything featuring the other two -- college movies are second only to high school movies in my heart, and I am such a Blair Waldorf apologist that I am even loving the idea of her incipient romance with the adorable Dan (Penn Badgley) on my guiltiest of guilty pleasures, Gossip Girl -- but in the end, my innate resistance to anything in the thriller/horror vein was defeated by my, put simply, curiosity. Meester had made it onto my radar long before making it to the Upper East Side, and I was familiar with her resume in such diverse works as Veronica Mars, Surface, Entourage and House. But seeing her as the damaged, single-white-femaling villain the trailers for this one foretold? It had to be done.

And you know what? It was pretty good.

This movie is not a horror in the slasher-flick sense, but it is very, very creepy. Mostly, it's Leighton Meester who is creepy... in a good way. A lot is more hinted at than shown (aww… kitty!), and having our imaginations supply the very worst possibilities for what might have occurred is often more effective than showing us even the most graphic carnage. True, some of the frights don’t come off quite as well as perhaps was originally intended, and the ending is... well, peculiar sums it up. But despite being derivative and ultimately enormously predictable, this movie was still a very good time. Seriously.

Our story begins when college freshman Sara (Minka Kelly, best known to me as fresh-faced behavioral therapist Gaby in Parenthood) moves into her new dorm room at the University of Los Angeles. She quickly meets party girl Tracey (Aly Michalka, best known to me as cheerleading law student Marti in Hellcats), soon-to-be-boyfriend Stephen (Cam Gigandet, best known to me as nasty, Bella-hunting vampire James from Twilight), and, finally, her roommate, Rebecca.

With just a few skilful blinks of her eyes and some well-played body language from Meester, we are soon given to understand that something is just a little bit… off about Rebecca. Her obsession with the little-bit-too-perfect Sara becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch, as Rebecca’s mental state fluctuates and deteriorates until she breaks with reality entirely. She messes with Tracey in the shower. Messes with Stephen in the library. She seduces, scares and schemes to keep Sara close, seeming to simultaneously want to adopt, date and be her.

Everyone in this movie does a fine job with what they’re given. Billy Zane even shows up, blessedly hairpiece-less, as a fashion design professor who is quite taken with our Sara, and The Vampire Diaries’ Nina Dobrev cameos ably as one of Rebecca’s former girl-crushes. But Leighton Meester is just really, really good here, by turns adorable, vulnerable, territorial and terrifying. She’s so good, that everyone else just looks to be going through the motions, by comparison. Which they probably are.

Okay, so this movie is no Hitchcockian triumph. It doesn’t try to make a statement about anything much (except, perhaps, that if you’re a lesbian then you deserve to get tied to a bed, near-suffocated and left there whilst your supposed friend snuggles with her boyfriend on the floor), and almost everyone in it looks way too mature to be the hopeful young college kids they’re supposed to be: Kelly is 29, Gigandet 27, and even Meester is 24. But aside from all its flaws, and it has many, The Roommate is perfectly watchable, with enough tension to keep the pulse pounding a bit faster than normal, enough complex psychology and dark(ish) relationship stuff to keep things interesting, and enough surprises that it doesn’t seem entirely like a retread mash-up of Single White Female, American Psycho, Basic Instinct and Scream 2.

No, not entirely.

   -- Rachel Hyland