Roommates on Netflix Is the College Comedy That Makes You Paranoid About Everyone You’ve Ever Liked

There is a specific kind of friendship that only exists in a dorm room. It is built from proximity rather than choice, sustained by the fact that you have to return to the same twenty square meters every night regardless of what happened between you during the day. Devon asked Celeste to be her roommate. She thought she was choosing. She was not. She was entering a social architecture that Celeste already understood and Devon did not — and by the time Devon realizes the difference, the rules have already been written without her.

Chandler Levack’s Roommates uses the machinery of the Happy Madison Netflix comedy — the ensemble cast, the spring break escalation, the parental comedic relief — to deliver something the machinery does not usually produce. Levack arrived at this project with two careers behind her: music and arts journalism (SPIN, The Village Voice) and a debut feature (I Like Movies, 2022) that ended without redemption for its protagonist. She does not fix her characters. She documents them with the precision of someone trained to describe what is actually happening, not what the subject wants you to see. That instinct, inside a studio comedy infrastructure, produces a film that is funny in the way that real social humiliation is funny — which is to say, funny if you are not the one it is happening to.

The film’s central argument is built on a distinction the genre almost never makes: passive aggression is not the subject. It is the mechanism. The subject is what passive aggression is designed to protect — the ability to prosecute a war while maintaining total plausible deniability that a war is happening at all. Celeste (Chloe East) is not a villain. She is a strategist who has correctly read the social architecture of forced cohabitation and calculated that direct confrontation costs more than covert pressure. Every individual act she deploys is defensible. The damage is only visible in aggregate, and by the time Devon (Sadie Sandler) has a clear view of the accumulation, she has already been trained to seem paranoid for noticing. This is not a character flaw. This is a rational response to the specific constraints of shared space — and Roommates is intelligent enough to present it as such.

You May Also LikeTo Save and Project: The 19th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation – See Screening Dates

Levack films the dorm room as a political document. Over the course of the film, whose belongings have crossed the invisible border, whose schedule has become the room’s default, whose sensory preferences have colonized shared space through incremental accumulation rather than confrontation — these are not background details. They are the argument. The camera registers the territorial shift across the runtime the way a journalist registers the evidence before writing the story: without editorializing, without telling the audience what to conclude, trusting that the accumulation speaks.

What makes the Devon/Celeste dynamic function at the level the film needs is the specific chemistry between Sadie Sandler and Chloe East — not just as performers but as biographical fact transposed to character. Sandler grew up inside the ecosystem producing this film. East arrived through conventional channels. That asymmetry of origin is visible in how each of them moves through a shared space: Celeste does not have to try to dominate because she has always known how rooms work; Devon does not have to admit she is losing because she has not yet learned to name what is happening to her. The power differential requires no exposition. The room already contains it.

The Gen-Z social vocabulary Devon and Celeste speak — boundaries, communication, space, emotional honesty as radical self-disclosure — is not a dialect the film translates for an older audience. Levack inhabits it. The specific cruelty she identifies is that this vocabulary, designed as a language of care, is also a precision instrument of control. When Celeste invokes her right to space, she is simultaneously defending an existing boundary and expanding her territorial claim. Devon has been handed the language of care and told it is her only available tool. The language is also the weapon. She cannot tell them apart because they were designed to be indistinguishable.

This tension — between the comfort infrastructure of Happy Madison and Levack’s instinct for unresolved emotional precision — runs through the film’s structure the way Devon and Celeste’s conflict runs through the dorm room: visible in the architecture, inadmissible as direct confrontation. Happy Madison is a machine built on resolution. Levack does not resolve. Her debut feature left its protagonist unredeemed because redemption would have been dishonest. Whether Roommates ultimately trusts that instinct or gives the audience the catharsis the genre contract promises is the question the spring break karaoke confrontation will answer. Karaoke removes the social permission not to perform. It makes vulnerability mandatory and public. It is the formal opposite of passive aggression — you cannot maintain covert ambiguity at a microphone. The song choice will tell you which filmmaker won the negotiation.

The extended Happy Madison Netflix lineage has been moving, title by title, toward a version of itself that trusts the premise more than the brand. Roommates is the first entry in that lineage built around a director whose sensibility is structurally incompatible with franchise comfort — and the studio appears to have let her work. What that produces is a film that, from a distance, looks like a known quantity: college comedy, roommate war, ensemble laughs, spring break. Up close, in the room, something more unsettling is happening. Two women are discovering who they actually are when nobody from home is watching. The discovery is not reversible. The person Devon was at orientation is not the person who will leave at the end of the semester. Whether the friendship is the price of that transformation or its first casualty — whether growing up requires the loss of the person you grew up alongside — is the question Roommates has the discipline to leave open. The room assignment has already determined more than either of them chose. What they do with what they now know about each other is the only thing the film refuses to answer.

Roommates premieres globally on April 17, 2026, exclusively on Netflix. Directed by Chandler Levack, written by Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O’Sullivan, and produced by Happy Madison Productions. Starring Sadie Sandler, Chloe East, Natasha Lyonne, and Nick Kroll.

More Like This

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). Netflix Horror Movie. Reviews

Jerry Seinfeld Debuts as Director with “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story” Coming to Netflix

The Elixir: Indonesia’s Zombie Terror Is Born from an Ancient Herbal Tradition

Wes Anderson selected to be the recipient of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker 2023 Award of the 80th Venice International Film Festival

“Wonderland” Sci-Fi Movie on Netflix: a halo of hope about Artificial Intelligence

Irresistible (2020). Movie Trailer. Steve Carell