For years, it went almost without saying that few women were allowed into the Happy Madison clubhouse. Happy Madison is the production company of Adam Sandler, responsible for most of his movies – almost all of the broad comedies he stars in, sometimes broad comedies he doesn’t, and now the occasional more serious-minded vehicle, something he’s experimented with further since signing and re-upping with Netflix. The Neflix deal has also expanded Happy Madison’s demographics, at least modestly. For years, high-profile women would rotate in and out of Sandler’s movies without accomplishing much. Technical Happy Madison alumni include Marisa Tomei, Salma Hayek, Winona Ryder, Kate Beckinsale, and Patricia Arquette – which is to say, a surprising number of Oscar nominees recruited just to play Sandler’s his love interest or wife for the times when Drew Barrymore was unavailable

Maybe it’s not all that laudable that Happy Madison’s increase in movies from a female perspective has increased just around the time Sandler’s daughters, Sadie and Sunny, have grown assured enough to star in their own films, rather than just doing cute-kid cameos in their dad’s comedies. But regardless of the reasons, women have directed multiple recent Happy Madison productions: the well-reviewed high-school-set You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah and the new college comedy Roommates. The director of the latter is Chandler Levack, who has managed the feat of putting out two movies in the same year, a particular rarity for historically underrepresented women filmmakers. (Two women who have managed it: Ida Lupino, in the 1950s, and Lena Dunham, in 2022.) Levack actually had her two films, Roommates and the autobiographical coming-of-age dramedy Mile End Kicks, released on the same day, the former on Netflix and the latter in theaters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they make a fine and instructive double feature, despite obvious tonal differences.

While Roommates strives for freshman-year relatability, Mile End Kicks has more postgrad specificity. Based on the Toronto-raised Levack’s experiences as a music critic exploring the Montreal indie rock scene of the 2010s, the movie stars Barbie Ferreira as Grace, a young woman who quits her dude-heavy alt-weekly writing job and heads to Montreal, hoping to complete a book about Alanis Morrissette. Specifically, she’s contracted to write an entry in the beloved 33 1/3 series of books about single albums and freeing herself from a relationship with her pathetic sleaze of an alt-weekly boss (Jay Baruchel), whose grossness is crystalized during a sex scene where he wears a Hold Steady t-shirt. As the owner of multiple Hold Steady shirts and rejected 33 1/3 proposals, I may have been triggered by this movie.

It’s good, though! I deserve to be triggered! Moreover, unlike so many music-based movies, and presumably owing to Levack’s knowledge in this area, Mile End Kicks shows real understanding of the music scene it’s about and the personalities who populate it. Grace is essentially torn between two members of the same shambolic but up-and-coming indie band, one whose narcissistically nonchalant affectations pass for mystique, and a nicer guy who’s both more and less available. Grace herself often feels like a more nuanced female equivalent of the frequently cited “nice guy” character: a young woman who is scrappy, hard-working, and prodigious on paper, but often impulsive, selfish, and self-destructive in practice.

Levack seems especially locked into the ways that young women’s social insecurity can radiate outward. This is true even in the more traditional Happy Madison shape of Roommates, with its quasi-random side characters marked for audience derision and a sentimental streak – though screenwriters Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O’Sullivan are current SNL writers, not Sandler’s usual cronies from 30 years earlier. Devon (Sadie Sandler) is a capable but awkward underdog who never made any close friends in high school and is now preparing for college hoping to find a genuine bestie; Celeste (Chloe East) is the cool girl she hits it off with at orientation and recruits to room with her. The roomies become super-close, super-fast, but eventually Devon is put off by Celeste’s erratic and boundary-light behavior, and the two young women wind up at odds. The story is narrated, unnecessarily but enjoyably, by the dean of students (Sarah Sherman) who knew the girls in her RA days and is using them as a cautionary tale for two more feuding roommates.

The movie’s portrayal of girl-on-girl social dynamics pays close attention to a female-coded experience, without getting too gender-essentialist about how much more loaded those roommate relationships can be than they are for a lot of guys. There are plenty of dumb running gags and bold-marker-underlined jokes in the overall style of Happy Madison, but the characters, especially Sandler and East, are messy in welcome and largely believable ways. Rather than portraying Devon as a put-upon Sandlerian underdog, Roommates is remarkably upfront about how her own timidities about confrontation contribute to a toxic dynamic with Celeste.

At least, that’s the case for most of the movie. Roommates makes such a baffling turn in its final stretch that it feels like it’s switched over to another, coarser movie without warning. I’d be shocked if someone else at Happy Madison didn’t step in with some kind of a rewrite, insisting that the movie needed a villain, and that said villain needed a comeuppance; the fight-bullying-with-bullying dynamic is all over the worst Happy Madison comedies (and some of the better ones, too) and, to Levack’s credit, feels entirely foreign to what she spends much of this movie developing. Compared to Mile End Kicks, where the movie’s considerable growing-pains angst (including roommate drama!) gives way to a giddy sense of exhilaration even in the face of failure, Roommates hits some surprisingly sour notes on its way out into the real world – which, weirdly, is even cartoonier than its caricatured but emotionally accurate depiction of college. It also manages to miss the opportunity for bittersweet reflection; the story truly swerves without so much as a turn signal, in a way that’s consequently difficult to read as fully intentional. It’s the kind of ending that makes you wonder if the actors even knew what was happening.

For all I know, this was exactly the ending Levack wanted, or exactly what the script always dictated. If so, it’s still a miscalculation, maybe in an attempt to match the breezy silliness of Happy Madison vehicles past. The two films still make a fine double feature, and show that Levack can work credibly in multiple modes, from character study to broad comedy to satire to sincerity. Roommates just comes with the asterisk that even as the company evolves to make movies for a new generation of fans with a promising filmmaker, old Happy Madison habits can be hard to break.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Roommates on Netflix