With Roommates, director Chandler Levack experiments with familiar settings in a familiar genre to give us an entertaining coming-of-age comedy that leans on relatability more than reinvention. The film follows a shy and lonely Devon Weisz (Sadie Sandler), who seeks to make her life in college less isolating than her years in school. When she meets the well-meaning and free-spirited Celeste Durand (Chloe East) at her college orientation, they become friends and then roommates, setting Devon on a path that begins to reshape her life. The director sets himself up with the challenge of working within one of the most overused settings and genres, but manages to craft a film without too much airs, even if some parts don’t quite land.
The problem with a familiar setting and genre is that it can be limiting, but the good thing about it is that it can also be relatable. Devon is your quintessential introvert. In her path to becoming an extrovert, she makes many mistakes. She doubts her friends, reads social cues incorrectly and even sets fires during confrontations. But Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara Jane O’Sullivan’s writing frames those confrontations in a way that you are able to attribute to the actions of college-going teenagers who don’t know better. While that can seem like a plotline that has been dug up after being used endlessly in a lot of films, Fowlie and O’Sullivan bring it into the modern day.
Roommates is framed as a retelling of Devon and Celeste’s story by Robyn Schilling (Sarah Sherman), who studied with the pair and is now a Dean trying to broker peace between two roommates. While the film establishes that Devon and Celeste’s story is being recounted to resolve a present-day conflict, the two timelines don’t quite intersect; instead existing like separate films. There are comedic moments, like one where a girl has to constantly reassure her insecure boyfriend that she is not involved with other boys, but you are left wondering what purpose they serve. Are they pointing to the emotional labour of dealing with such insecurity, establishing character, or simply inserted as jokes? Incomplete moments like these break the flow of the film.
The cast of Roommates plays their parts to perfection. Sandler can express the evolution of a quiet and naïve girl into an outspoken and street-smart woman, both in big and small moments. Meanwhile, East carries the unpredictability of a manipulative sociopath, masquerading as a nice person, with finesse. While it is very easy to box off Roommates as second-screen content or just another OTT film, in its tight runtime, it provides just enough levity to remind you of your matinee reruns from the television era.