Young women aren't directing enough movies. Chandler Levack has two out this weekend.

The convoluted dynamic of learning early life lessons continues chronologically into college with Levack’s Roommates. This time, Devon (Sadie Sandler) is the social outsider looking desperately for a friend before freshman year, when she meets the slightly older wild card, Celeste (Chloe East). They commit to becoming roommates, but from the start, things look shaky. Celeste isn’t responding to her texts, but then surprises Devon as she moves in. She begs Devon to pay for almost everything, including their spring break trip to Florida. As the friendship fractures over a lack of boundaries, Devon is increasingly pushed to the brink to defend herself from her out-of-control roommates. 

Devon and Celeste’s saga is a cautionary tale against letting disagreements fester and boundaries disintegrate without standing up for oneself. Although Roommates was written by Jimmy Fowlie and Ceara O’Sullivan and features some lowbrow jokes not seen in Levack’s self-written scripts, Levack still makes the movie her own, homing in on the messy nature of Devon and Celeste’s friendship. It’s almost like a toxic romantic relationship, from the meet-cute to the love-bombing that’s just as manipulative as it is flattering. While Roommates shares some undeniable similarities to Levack’s other work, its comedy is much broader, the performances more outsized than the subtly devastating moments in I Like Movies and Mile End Kicks.  

In Levack’s other new feature this weekend, Mile End Kicks, which she also wrote, Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is a music critic trying to find her place in a male-dominated field while covering the guy-heavy music scene in Montreal in 2011. While struggling to make rent and write a book she’s sold about Alanis Morissette, she falls for a member of one of the bands she covers, risking everything she’s worked for as well as a friendship with one of the other band members. Like in Roommates, Grace finds an uneasy alliance with her Montreal roommate Madeleine (Juliette Gariépy), but here, Madeleine acts like Grace’s bigger sister, a few years older and wiser (if not in the relationship department), who pushes Grace to grow up and pay her half of the rent, and who grows increasingly frustrated when Grace flails, as many of those in their early 20s do. 

While Levack’s camera shows the audience both Grace and Devon’s evolving emotions, as both writer and director, Levack gives Grace’s story more uncomfortable twists and turns, plunging her heroine into the excitement of work and young love, and the crushing disappointment when none of it pans out. Levack especially homes in on the drama of silence, showing close-ups of Grace’s reaction as she realizes the guy she likes isn’t that interested in her, or the intensity of an interrupted concert when another band member storms off stage in brooding anger. Loosely based on Levack’s experience as a music critic, Mile End Kicks—more than the mass-appeal-seeking Roommates—is the culmination of her interests: flawed characters navigating tricky situations that take place in a passionate community.

In all of her movies, Levack gives her characters space to fail, leaning into their mistakes as opportunities to find their voices and figure out who they really are in these formative years. While some moments may feel over-the-top, there are certain painfully relatable scenes that ground the movies in universal embarrassments—our collective bank of bad memories, like falling for the wrong partner or casually saying something mean without realizing it. Sometimes, growing up means having to say you’re sorry, to hold space for tough conversations, or to say “I love you” without hearing it back. Although Levack finds common ground between Roommates and Mile End Kicks, her different approach to each movie shows two different ways of laughing through life’s awkward stages.