The current acclaim for Canadian cinema is, like many attempts to promote a new wave, a snapshot of a rising generation that aside from nationality has very little in common. Matt Johnson, Pascal Plante, Sophy Romvari, Kazik Radwanski, and Antoine Bourges are all familiar with Canadian film funding structures, but their relationship to cultural signifiers or any notions of how to define non-fiction or personal cinema increasingly diverge the closer one looks. Chandler Levack’s 2026 — two films released on the same day — is perhaps even more representative of this definitional reach.
One might say that Levack is a true outlier among that group of millennial directors: she is genuinely realizing the mission that has traditionally doomed Canadian filmmakers, in that she is making her own versions of successful American genre films — and being praised for it. The protagonist of her debut I Like Movies is an abrasively judgmental fan of Adam Sandler and SNL. This detail helped put it on the radar of Sandler’s team, leading to Roommates, which stars Sandler’s daughter Sadie, and is part of the Happy Madison-Netflix deal that has, like all of that company’s theater-injuring deals, kept the star’s work out of cinemas for a decade and counting.
Released up against Mile End Kicks, an indie film about indie music in Montreal readymade for critical appreciation (its protagonist is an early-career critic), this appears to be an instance of one-for-them, one-for-me. Levack has said, “When you make a movie with Adam, he is really the auteur.” Yet Levack, American studio filmmaker, isn’t wildly different from Levack, Canadian artist. If anything, working with a larger budget and using a script she didn’t pen covers a number of the flaws of Mile End Kicks and reveals that Levack is a capable director in the tradition she clearly wants to evoke — the American studio comedy, sometimes drama-inflected, at times romantic, of the late-’80s to early-’00s.
While SNL writers and cast members are in ample supply, Roommates has a comedic concept that is not synonymous with, say, the other recent Sandler daughter production (2023’s You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, starring Sunny Sandler). Nor is it simply a less personal variant of her previous film. Even an appreciator of Mile End’s mixture of cringe comedy and sympathy would have to grant that the film is completely hemmed in. Montreal’s music scene is almost entirely localized to a single band and a single venue; while this perhaps can be seen as a failing of the film’s growth-averse protagonist rather than the film, it becomes very clear that the film’s claim to portraiture, even an outsider’s, is weak. It’s hard to convey the promise and chaos of a music scene when the scene is largely offscreen.
Roommates, by virtue of its scale, is released from these considerations. Devon (Sadie Sandler) and Celeste (Chloe East) are first-years at the fictional Walton University. Their narrative serves as an instructive parable for a dean (Sarah Sherman) who is attempting to resolve a conflict between another pair of roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk) some years later. Devon and Celeste are pitched as opposites: the former comes from a “nice” well-off family, while the latter is constantly embroiled in “family stuff” and harbors some degree of class resentment. But the students, both architecture majors taking the same poetry elective, are revealed to be on a similar plane and grow equally vindictive. (In a move that justifies their otherwise arbitrary subject of study, this development is suggested as a matter of social geography — they aren’t crazy, but the layout of their dorm might be.) That the film begins sympathetic to Devon’s new-school anxiety and ends by discarding most of its realistic plot expectations is a feature of the parallel narratives. Because the tale is being “told,” what begins as a Sandler-family moral can be reinvented into comedic opportunism or pathos scene by scene.
Levack’s imprint is clear in certain narrative inflections, but perhaps nowhere more than in how, despite this structure, the film is not a thinly strung-together series of sketches. The film can only work if each moment of dean-disciplinary commentary is followed by a re-immersion into Devon and Celeste’s world, and Levack knows how to play up the sense of near-friendless despair that undergirds both of her leads’ behaviors, whether around setting boundaries or playing rivals for family acceptance.
This sharp characterization stands out amidst the film’s resources: there is a world of courses and extracurriculars and frat parties and suburban holiday gatherings here, with room for cameos from Carol Kane and Steve Buscemi. Its generic range is slightly unusual, in that most of this resembles the naive developments of the high-school comedy, perhaps based on a generation’s altered social education resulting from a pandemic and phone addiction. (There isn’t even a trace of the ambitions suggested by the campus novel.) This shift toward immature characterization creates a broad contrast: if its characters are solipsistic, the film is just as perceptive about its genre limitations.
In most assessments of Sandler productions, this disparity in perspective is called carelessness. Yet Roommates is quite purposeful, in a way that is both the studio head’s doing and Levack’s. Roommate conflict is inevitable and inevitably comedic; in this clearly framed premise it must either become an instructive lesson or a cautionary tale. The very looseness with which the film allocates mundane detail and spectacle allows for contradictions to emerge: characters are shaded with psychologically coherent flaws — Devon’s academic performance and Celeste’s social performance are troubled by hidden, volatile motivations — which is diverted into farce rather than used for redemption.
How the film gets out of this potential dead end — it can’t be satisfactory as both a parable and a farce — is through the flexibility presented in lying; the characters lie, the dean-as-narrator lies, maybe the end-title cards lie as well. This isn’t done with an audience-placating wink, but with commitment: each lie opens up another chain of narrative consequences. If Levack’s personal scripts have been enforced by their need to appear truthful, the life of a studio director means that, in working with others’ ideas, some form of lying becomes necessary. That the result is her most wide-ranging and tonally controlled film so far suggests this can be a virtue.
DIRECTOR: Chandler Levack; CAST: Sadie Sandler, Chloe East, Billy Bryk, Sarah Sherman, Carol Kanę; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: April 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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