There’s a complicated, bittersweet study of female friendship fighting to free itself from the glib, shiny, “Saturday Night Live”-adjacent comic veneer of “Roommates,” and when it shows through, in enticing fits and starts, it even approaches wisdom. Elsewhere, however, this Netflix original from up-and-coming Canadian filmmaker Chandler Levack disappointingly flattens the moral and emotional zigzags of an increasingly toxic college roommate situation, losing nuance as it seeks to appoint one of its leads a heroine and the other a villain. Both, happily, are played far more interestingly — by Sadie Sandler and Chloe East — than this binary might suggest, and the film that “Roommates” might have been mostly lives in their nervy, careering performances.
A swift follow-up to Levack’s Toronto-premiered indie romantic comedy “Mile End Kicks” (being released more or less simultaneously in U.S. theaters, as it happens), her fourth feature will be easily her most widely viewed thanks to the reach of the streaming giant, and feels tooled in many respects to become a GenZ conversation piece. But as her first film from another writer’s script — with “SNL” team Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara Jane O’Sullivan doing the honors here — “Roommates” feels perhaps less indicative of the director’s point of view, with the production imprint of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison shingle also brashly stamped on the final product. By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.
You could argue that the film’s wild tonal swings themselves represent the unpredictable vagaries of young womanhood: A key needle-drop in proceedings, after all, is “Girl, So Confusing,” Charli XCX and Lorde’s glitchy ode to fraught, insecure female relationships. But that doesn’t really justify the shtickiest impulses here, beginning with a frankly terrible framing device, written and performed in quasi-afterschool special style, in which another “SNL” alum, Sarah Sherman, plays a college dean relating the principal narrative in cautionary fashion to two warring roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk, both wasted) on her watch.
In the elder’s tale, high-achieving loner Devon (Sandler) heads to college hopeful of finally making the friends that eluded her in high school. She’s a smart, gawky young woman with much to offer, doted on by her wackily liberal parents (Natasha Lyonne and Nick Kroll, forever cracking wise) and shy, closeted younger brother Alex (Aidan Langford), but ill-prepared for the real world. Or, indeed, for Celeste (East), a randomly tattooed, recklessly extroverted free spirit who charges into her life during freshman orientation, giving Devon her first, unfamiliar taste of sisterhood. The two swiftly decide to be roommates, and their first weeks together are a giddy, hard-partying blur.
But pretty much from the off, Celeste is a walking red-flag parade, given to selfish, unreliable behavior and long lapses in communication — particularly after borrowing Devon’s money, which she does with some regularity. But she’s a buoyant, emboldening force too, encouraging Devon in her halting pursuit of flirtatious teaching assistant Michael (Billy Bryk) and winning over the family when she joins them her Thanksgiving. (Her own unhappy family life is a touchy subject.)
There are hints of bipolar disorder here, though the script scarcely delves into them before escalating the women’s relationship into an increasingly caustic, cartoonish feud — a more far-fetched, less compelling development than the poignantly ambiguous, passive-aggressive friendship outlined up until this point
East, especially, deserves sharper, deeper writing. She plays Celeste too cannily to merit the film’s strangely abrupt rejection of her character: equal parts narcissistic nightmare and flailing little girl lost, something playing up the latter persona as an opportunistic ploy, but sometimes looking genuinely, disturbingly adrift. Given the more obviously sympathetic character, however, Sandler doesn’t ignore Devon’s callow blind spots and occasional lack of social graces — which also leaves the film feeling at cross-purposes when it shifts to cheering on her revenge mission. Stuffed with distracting celebrity cameos and shot in Netflix’s peppily colorful, evenly-lit house style, “Roommates” ultimately plays things broad and bright, but when it lets some shadow into proceedings, it feels a lot closer to the truth.