Single White Female (1992)

Arriving in 1992, at the height of the erotic thriller's golden age, Single White Female adapts John Lutz's novel SWF Seeks Same into a two-hander about an apartment, a roommate, and a fixation that curdles into violence. Barbet Schroeder directs with a sommelier's patience, letting notes of Vertigo and Rosemary's Baby breathe. The casting is a star vehicle and nothing more: Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, both white, surrounded by more white faces. Two women at the center of a studio picture was a curiosity of the moment, not a program.

The film's social awareness is faint and largely accidental. Allie designs software; a fashion-house buyer named Mitchell squeezes her price and then attempts coercion, and she fights him off. That reads as survival instinct, not economic critique. The underground sex club and the borrowed name gesture toward queer material, but the film uses it as menace and titillation, the standard grammar of its era. Hedy is diagnosed, in effect, as a borderline case, and her condition is rendered as the monster's engine, which is the opposite of advocacy. Race, climate, the body, and history go untouched. The film has no interest in instructing anyone.

Craft and pulp remain in tension, and that friction is the point. Roger Ebert gave it three stars; the critical consensus settled at a shrug; audiences offered a B minus. The box office did not shrug. A direct-to-video sequel followed, and a remake is now in production, which says more about present appetites than about the original's merits. Here is a picture that never lectures, never sermonizes, and never once turns to the camera to explain the world. We can respect that. We can even feel a small, unfashionable relief at it.