'Roommates' Review: Besties Turn Testy in an Uneven College Comedy With Two Terrific Leads
Apr 17, 2026 7:44am PT
‘Roommates’ Review: Besties Turn Testy in an Uneven College Comedy With Two Terrific Leads
As initially inseparable roomies undone by envy and exploitation, Sadie Sandler and Chloe East give Chandler Levack's Netflix film a ring of emotional truth even when it spirals into silliness.
By
Guy Lodge
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Guy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge
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©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
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.
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