Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Having recently split from her fiancé, Allison Jones welcomes new roommate Hedra Carlson. The young women quickly form a bond, but soon Allison begins to notice not all’s well with her new tenant.
Single White Female is a competent early-90s psychological thriller that rides the Fatal Attraction wave of obsession-gone-wrong narratives. The setup is effectively creepy and Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh deliver solid performances, with Leigh particularly unsettling in her transformation. The cinematography is serviceable NYC apartment gothic but unremarkable. The plot, however, follows a fairly predictable escalation arc common to the genre, and the third act devolves into slasher-adjacent territory that undermines the more nuanced psychological tension built earlier. The ending is especially conventional — a standard survival showdown that squanders the more interesting identity-dissolution themes the film flirts with. Novelty suffers because the film is largely derivative of the obsessive-intruder genre popularized by Fatal Attraction and others, offering few genuinely fresh ideas beyond its gender dynamics.