{"id":384938,"date":"2026-04-17T23:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T23:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/384938\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T23:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T23:21:14","slug":"sweet-funny-clashing-tones-jockey-for-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/384938\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweet, funny, clashing tones jockey for space"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years, Happy Madison has been the go-to home for Adam Sandler and his cohort of Gen X buddies like Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Kevin James. But a funny thing has happened now that Sandler\u2019s nepotistic productions have switched from including his friends to his literal family. As The Sandman has started to create star vehicles for his two daughters, Happy Madison has somewhat improbably become a thriving ecosystem for female-directed movies<\/a> about the teen girl experience. Sunny Sandler lovingly explored the woes of middle school in the sweet surprise You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah<\/a> and will tackle high school musicals later this year in Don\u2019t Say Good Luck. Now her older sister Sadie is charting the highs and lows of the freshman college experience with Netflix\u2019s amiable if half-baked comedy Roommates. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, both the strength and weakness of Roommates is that it\u2019s trying to be two movies in one. There\u2019s a delightfully absurdist streak to an opening where two contemporary college roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk) have what amounts to a very messy public breakup on the lawn outside their dorm. After screaming about bloody pads and tossing air fryers out a third-story window, they\u2019re called into the office of the Dean Of Student Life (Saturday Night Live\u2018s Sarah Sherman). To scare them straight, she decides to recount the story of another pair of troubled roommates whose initial friendship curdled into something much thornier.<\/p>\n

Thus the film flashes back to introduce Devon (Sandler), an academically gifted but largely friendless high school grad determined that college will finally be her time to shine. Though her try-hard ways don\u2019t initially pay off at a pre-college wildness bonding excursion, she eventually clicks with nonchalant cool girl Celeste (Chloe East). Their fast friendship makes it easy to say yes to sharing a dorm room in the fall. Once they actually move in, however, the usual minor roommate issues (stealing clothes, not using headphones at 2 AM) slowly escalate into some much bigger red flags, including Celeste enmeshing herself with Devon\u2019s family and hooking up with a guy in Devon\u2019s bed.<\/p>\n

While the Dean Of Student Life framing device is purposefully heighted, Sandler and East are fantastic at bringing a level of emotional realism to Devon and Celeste\u2019s complicated bond, which is two parts Girls, one part Single White Female<\/a>. For every moment Celeste crosses a boundary, there\u2019s another moment she buoys Devon up\u2014tweaking her makeup, helping her look cool in front of her old high school classmates, going all-out with her birthday d\u00e9cor. The end credits eventually roll to Charli xcx\u2019s \u201cGirl, So Confusing,\u201d and that\u2019s very much the dynamic at play within the walls of their dorm room. Does Celeste like Devon? Does she hate her? Or are they both just projecting a whole lot of personal baggage onto each other? As Charli sings, \u201cIt\u2019s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the female college experience has been severely underexplored in cinema and there\u2019s a lot of great specificity and banter to the script by SNL writers Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O\u2019Sullivan. Roommates understands the weird odd-couple friendships that form based on little more than who lives across the hall, the ways the dorm room experience can both magnify and elide class differences, and the codependence that often springs up as young people used to being part of a family unit are suddenly thrust into semi-adulthood together. Fowlie and O\u2019Sullivan respect the autonomy and intelligence of 19-year-old girls while still laughing at their foibles\u2014whether it\u2019s the dormmate who\u2019s perpetually on the phone with her high school boyfriend or another who brags that her entire personality can be summed up by the four posters she hangs on her wall: Clueless, The Grateful Dead, an ad for a Basquiat show, and a portrait of Karl Marx.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For her part, director Chandler Levack<\/a> uses her experience with humanist dramedies like I Like Movies<\/a> and Mile End Kicks to bring out wonderfully lived-in performances from her entire ensemble. Nick Kroll is unexpectedly grounded as a loving dad who also quietly sets pretty high expectations for his daughter. Natasha Lyonne feels like a suburban mom who\u2019s actually lived a life for once. Billy Bryk effectively toes the line between creepy and sweet as a senior who strikes up a flirtation with Devon. Most heartwarming of all is Devon\u2019s bond with her younger brother Alex (Aidan Langford), who teases her for her non-committal way of smoking a joint and who\u2019s probably gay (though no one in the family is rushing him into announcing that).\u00a0<\/p>\n

All those warm relationship dynamics contribute to the way the more isolated Celeste views\u2014and potentially tries to sabotage\u2014Devon. Her studied nonchalance hides a whole lot of jealousy, just as Devon\u2019s people-pleasing streak hides a whole lot of resentment. The trouble is, Roommates\u2018 emotional realism is so compelling that by the time it decides to swing around to being a full-on black comedy, it\u2019s hard not to feel disappointed by the ending. To be fair, that is the setup promised by the framing device, so the film doesn\u2019t exactly pull a fast one, and the cast is equally committed to the more heightened comedy when it arrives. It\u2019s just that the two tones make for awkward roommates; you long to see one or the other explored in full rather than shoved together into a small space. At least it\u2019s a very on-theme problem.<\/p>\n

Director: Chandler Levack
Writer: Jimmy Fowlie, Ceara O\u2019Sullivan
Starring: Sadie Sandler, Chloe East, Sarah Sherman, Nick Kroll, Natasha Lyonne, Aidan Langford, Billy Bryk, Bella Murphy, Jaya Harper, Storm Reid, Ivy Wolk, Janeane Garofalo, Carol Kane
Release Date: April 17, 2026 (Netflix)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, Happy Madison has been the go-to home for Adam Sandler and his cohort of Gen X…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-384938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}