Rooming with Danger (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 12) I subjected my husband Charles to a couple more Lifetime movies, Rooming with Danger and A Roommate to Die For. I was interested in Rooming with Danger because it was directed by one of my favorite Lifetime writers, Christine Conradt, but alas she didn’t write this one. John F. Hayes did, and he didn’t follow Conradt’s example of making the villain morally complex and giving her (and this time it is a her; New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once described the Lifetime formula as “Pussies in Peril,” and this is one of the sub-genre in which the pussy is in peril from another pussy) some dimension and an understandable and even relatable motivation. Oh, he tried, but it didn’t really work. The central character – the pussy in peril, as it were – of Rooming with Danger is Angelina Ayerson (Camila Senna), who works as a suicide prevention counselor at a youth center and as the story opens is in the process of leaving a monumentally abusive boyfriend, emergency ambulance driver Marco (Adrian Quiñonez). Since they’d been living together, Angelina needs a new place to stay, and her friend Gaby (Emily Roslyn Villareal), who works for an advertising agency, helps her move out and brings along her friend from work, hotshot ad executive Diego (Christopher Millan). Immediately Marco assumes that Diego is Angelina’s new lover, which he isn’t – at least, not yet, though Gaby is industriously working to set them up with each other (and Christopher Millan is hot enough that in most Lifetime movies he’d be playing the villain). Gaby invites Angelina to stay with her, but Angelina doesn’t want to because she figures Marco already knows where Gaby lives. Instead she just stays there for a few days – during which Marco comes over in the middle of the night, hammers on the door and leaves a brick outside – until she answers an ad from Bianca Hernandez (Daniela Rivera) for a roommate.

Bianca lives in a stunning beach house – she works as a free-lance fashion designer and one wonders how she could afford it, even with someone else to share the rent – with an outdoor swimming pool (though, contrary to the principle of Chekhov’s pistol, no one drowns in it). Alas, by moving in with Bianca after leaving Marco, Angelina has leaped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. Bianca first keeps casting Angelina looks that make her seem like the Cheshire Cat. Then she turns monumentally possessive, insisting on tagging along on Angelina’s girl-dates with Gaby and at one point calling Angelina “Alicia.” Alicia, it turns out, is Bianca’s now-dead younger sister, a troubled teen who killed herself one night after sending Bianca out on a dinner date with their parents. So Bianca keeps bringing in new roommates, trying to make them over into a replacement for Alicia, and knocking them off when they resist. There’s a marvelously ironic moment in which director Conradt cuts from Angelina telling Gaby, “I’m so 100 percent over psychos,” to a shot of Bianca tossing her immediately previous roommate’s body into a lake in a black leather body bag which Bianca, with her fashion skills, has custom-made. There’s also some business over an heirloom ring with which Angelina’s grandfather proposed to her grandmother, which Angelina’s mother sent to Marco, not realizing that they’d broken up. Angelina calls Marco to ask if she can come over and get back the ring, only Marco won’t give it to her unless she agrees to marry him. When she refuses, Marco pulls a gun on both her and Bianca, who’d tagged along ostensibly to offer moral support. As they flee for their lives, Bianca asks Angelina if she had any idea Marco owned a gun, and Angelina says she didn’t – though this is the United States of America, after all, where guns are as easy to get as chewing gum.

Later Bianca goes over to Marco’s place and kills him, dumping his body over the same railing onto the same lake she used for her previous roommate (and encasing it in an identical black leather body bag), after which she presents Angelina the ring and says she had a lawyer friend who helped her recover it legally. The climax occurs at Bianca’s home, in which she’s gone totally off the rails and threatens Gaby – only Angelina is able to sneak up behind Bianca and take her out with the proverbial blunt object. Before that Bianca has stabbed Diego (ya remember Diego?), who came out in order to help (when she killed Marco she also stole his cell phone, and used it to send phony texts to Angelina posing as Marco) but got assaulted with a stiletto (and having just watched Cry Terror! I was well aware of how sharp stilettos are, since writer Andrew Stone had helpfully inserted an explanation). Fortunately Diego is rescued and taken to the emergency room in time, and the film ends with Angelina moving in with Gaby while also dating Diego. Rooming with Danger is an O.K. Lifetime movie, not as good as it could have been with Christine Conradt writing as well as directing (she surely would have made much more of Bianca’s backstory and made us feel truly sorry for her!), and it has one of those annoying open-ended endings Lifetime has become partial to, with Bianca in a women’s jail obsessing about her cellmate and doing a drawing of her, posting it on the wall of their cell, to indicate that she’ll be the next object of Bianca’s sick obsessions. (A Roomnmate to Die For also has an open-ended ending like that: in this one, the bad guy turns up in San Francisco, 500 miles away from his previous target in Los Angeles, running the same scam on another woman.)