CHENNAI: Netflix is into a season of crime capers. There has recently been “Inventing Anna,” about a young woman who passed herself off as a German heiress and enslaved New York’s rich but gullible society, and “The Tinder Swindler,” on a man who fooled women on dating sites to part with their money.
While the first, was a fictionalized account of Anna Delvey’s (born Anna Sorokin) life, the second was an out-and-out documentary.
Now, similar to the last one, comes the new docuseries from Blumhouse, “Worst Roommate Ever,” which is not as interesting, really gory, and takes viewers on a bloody trail of murder most foul.
(Alfred) Hitchcockian in a vague sort of way, the English filmmaker hardly ever showed anything as bloody as “Worst Roommate Ever.”
Domini Hofmann has directed all five episodes, which reveal extremely disturbing stories and provide little relief. Most watchers will likely tend to be left depressed, but probably wiser in understanding how some criminal minds work to cheat and kill. Their motives are as old as mankind – greed for money and obsessive love.
Examples include a middle-aged man who murders when rejected by a woman and an elderly lady who turns out to be a serial killer, poisoning people for their social security cheques.
The first episode centers on Dorothea Puente, known to most people affectionately as “granny.” But behind the veneer of adorability and respectability lay a monster, who ran a boarding house for the homeless in California’s Sacramento.
In the second episode, a US army veteran, 36-year-old Maribel Ramos, in Orange, California, took 55-year-old K.C. Joy, a Korean single male, as her roommate. They shared a lovely roommate relationship until he flipped for her and confessed this to her sister.
Things then began to get erratic, and a wild side of him became apparent, leading to tragic consequences.
And then there was ace hustler Youssef Khater, from Lebanon but claiming to be a Palestinian, who cheated money from the people he lived with in Santiago, Chile. He also said he was a marathon runner, but when the fog cleared and the picture became clearer, he would stoop to even killing.
Unfortunately, “Worst Roommate Ever” is impersonal in its narration and left a feeling of slight annoyance that a subject as terrible as this was not getting its act right when talking about the death and destruction of people who blindly trusted cold-blooded criminals hiding in sheep’s clothing. A little more feeling could have gone into this docuseries.
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