Honestly, Leighton Meester made this movie for me. And it wasn't by scaring me. It was through her vulnerability, and the fact that no one gave her what she needed the most: friendship.
Warning: the rest of this blog post is going to contain spoilers. Read at your own peril.
Suffice it to say, Leighton Meester is the only actor in that movie. Which is surprising, because I'm usually a pretty big Billy Zane fan, and he has a part in this movie - but I just didn't feel that he did a very good job in this movie. Billy Zane gave a lukewarm performance, and Minka Kelly got to play the pretty girl whom everyone adores automatically, b/c that's just the way some girls are received...
So maybe I didn't respond well to this film b/c I wasn't one of those girls. I'm kind of shy, and I've never been the kind of person who people just flock around. I've never been the kind of girl who gets invited to a party the first day she meets someone, and I've never had a good experience at a frat house, and all of the boys I dated in college were losers who didn't go to my school.
I was actually treated a lot more like Rebecca, Leighton Meester's character. There is something in me, a reserve, that sprung up unawares sometime during the period that I was growing up, that convinces people I am stuck up rather than shy. This is the vibe I got from Leighton Meester's character. Even before she said anything, before she had a chance to be mean or rude and deserving of being shunned, she was treated oddly and people whispered that she was scary within hearing range.
The two girls that she obsesses about are the girls whom she wants to be, because they are loved by all. (Who doesn't want to be loved?) And so she struggles to be nice to them, and goes a little bit overboard b/c she has a mental illness, and their response is to tell her she was never their friend.
That's just mean.
Is it really necessary, to shatter whatever normal, human part of her exists by taking all of their interaction that was truly on friendly terms, and making it meaningless?
She has a mental illness, she needs to go to a hospital, not be mocked by "normal" people, who are really just as heartless as they think she is.
For what did Aly Michalka's character Tracy do, that was so worthy of friendship? Invite Sara to a few parties, get too drunk, and abandon her at a nightclub? Oh. Yeah. That sounds like a winner. Like someone who cares.
I don't understand this mentality that a person has to be "cool" all the time. Like, if you're really my friend, you'll be there for me and have my back, but don't tell me that or act like that unless you're drunk.
Leighton Meester's Rebecca did exactly that - whatever she thought her friend needed. She tried to give her friend Sara what she wanted, even when what she wanted was ridiculous. And all she wanted in return was a friend.
For which she was shot and killed.
So who was the real murderer in the movie? The girl with the mental illness who thought she was doing what her friend needed? Or the girl whom everyone adored who didn't do the rational thing and talk to her roommate's parents or, at the least, her hall monitor about any issues she was having?
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