A Roommate to Die For (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie, A Roommate to Die For, directed by Randy Carter and scripted by the usual Hybrid Productions writing team of Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff, probably would have seemed stronger if it hadn’t been shown right after Rooming with Danger, with which it has, shall we say, strong similarities. This time around the pussy in peril is Faith Davis (Angela Cole), a reasonably successful realtor in the beachfront town of Franklin Bluffs, California (what we see of it looks like the San Diego County island town of Coronado), and the boyfriend she’s in the process of breaking up with when the story begins is Jeremy Higgins (Austin Valli). Jeremy isn’t actively abusive, just air-headed and charmingly irresponsible, and after a flash-forward sequence showing Jeremy being Tased by an unseen assailant and tied up with duct tape to a chair and a chyron reading, “Three Weeks Earlier,” Faith is shown throwing him out of their home, which she’s been savvy enough to keep in her own name. She advertises for a roommate online and the person she gets is a male, Vincent James (Zane Haney), who claims to be a burned-out attorney who quit the gig six months before and is going back to school to learn to be a teacher. The heroine’s best friend in this one is Jaden (Taylor Carter), a racially ambiguous woman (despite the gender-ambiguous first names of both the character and the actor playing her!) co-worker at Faith’s realty office, who naturally tries to warn Faith against letting someone she barely knows move in with her. Vincent offers one reference, Barbara Drake (Bunny Gibson), a woman he supposedly rented a room from while attending law school at Stanford, who returns a message Faith leaves on her voicemail.

Things go O.K. for a while until there’s suddenly a confrontation between Faith and Vincent in which Vincent chews her out for entering his room, following which he starts throwing his legal knowledge at her and specifying she’s not supposed to come into his room. He tells her that the living room, dining room and kitchen are “communal spaces” in which he has as much of a right to access as she does, and eventually he starts ordering her around her own home. He also has his own locks installed on his room’s doors, through which we can hear him playing some sort of recorded online course; his obsession with privacy made me think he was running some particularly dastardly and illegal enterprise from there, but Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff just left that loose end dangling. At Jaden’s suggestion, Faith consults attorney Natalie Beck (Avis Wrentmore), who charges her $350 an hour to tell her there’s nothing she can do against Vince except to start a formal proceeding for eviction, which could take at least three months – more if he fights it. She also files a complaint with the local police and meets with Detective Carol Stein (Yuri Brown), another African-American authority figure in a Lifetime movie. The cop tells her there’s not much she can do to stop Vincent, and when Faith offers to play her a recording she made of Vincent threatening her. Stein stops her and says, “I’ll pretend you didn’t say you had a recording.” It turns out that California is a two-party state, which means that you can only record a conversation if both parties give their consent, and Faith could be convicted of a felony for recording Vincent without his knowledge or permission.

The Kafka-esque nature of Faith’s predicament is by far the most powerful aspect of this film: over and over again she’s told by the various authority figures she goes to for help that there’s absolutely nothing she can do. Ultimately Faith traces Vincent to the high school he attended, Valley Ridge, and meets a former classmate of his who tells Faith that “Vincent”’s real name is Wayne Travers, and he disappeared from school shortly before graduating after he choked and nearly killed the girl he took to the school prom. Faith also has the idea of trying to drive Wayne out of her home by hosting a loud party with her office friends, and Wayne appears to be gone – only he sneaks back in, and in a pathetic (in both senses) attempt to explain himself, he starts whining about how all he ever wanted was a place to live, somewhere he could call home. Charles said A Roommate to Die For reminded him of the 1990 movie Pacific Heights, which we’d watched together in 2007 on a pre-recorded VHS tape, which had been directed by John Schlesinger and had starred Matthew Modine, Melanie Griffith and Michael Keaton (Modine and Griffith as the couple who rented a room to Keaton, the tenant from hell), and though we watched that before I started moviemagg I looked up my old journal entry and noted that, ironically, I’d written, that “though it has Hitchcockian aspirations (the director’s cameo appearance, the Bisexual villain, casting the daughter of a Hitchcock blonde in the lead and even having Griffith victimized by a frontal assault from a bird, an in-joke reference to her mother having starred in The Birds), it’s really more like a Lifetime movie with a ‘name’ director and major stars.”