Filmmaker Chandler Levack on Roommates and Mile End Kicks

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In her latest films, Roommates and Mile End Kicks, filmmaker Chandler Levack explores the messy, magnetic, and often painful terrain of identity, especially as it forms in close relationships.Levack offers a candid look into how she builds emotional tension, crafts visual storytelling, and finds humor in discomfort, all while centering characters who feel like outsiders in their own lives.

At the heart of Roommates is a friendship that slowly combusts. What begins as minor irritations such as late-night phone scrolling, and clashing habits spirals into something far more intense. For Levack, capturing that escalation wasn’t just about performance or dialogue, but about physical space itself.

One of the film’s most striking techniques is its evolving set design. The shared dorm room quite literally shrinks as the story progresses. “At the beginning the room is huge,” Levack explains, “and then we purposely build the set smaller and smaller.” The effect is subtle but powerful, creating a growing sense of claustrophobia that mirrors the emotional suffocation between the characters.

But beyond visual tricks, Levack roots the pacing in the psychology of female friendship, an intimacy that can feel all consuming and unstable at once. “You’re so close to somebody… but you’re constantly wondering, do they actually like me?” she says. That uncertainty becomes the engine of the film.

A key tension in Roommates lies in how the audience perceives Celeste. Is she manipulative? Misunderstood? Both?

Levack intentionally plays in that gray area. Even she admits being swayed by the charisma of the actor portraying Celeste. “I had to remind myself, you’re not on her side,” she says. By experimenting with different tones in rehearsal and on set, sometimes sincere, sometimes subtly cruel the film resists easy answers.

This ambiguity is heightened by the story’s perspective. While we primarily follow Devon, the audience is given just enough distance to question her interpretation of events. The result is a dynamic where truth feels slippery, and emotional reality takes precedence over objective facts.

Levack is drawn to characters who exist on the margins—people who hover at the edge of conversations, unsure how to step in. Both Devon in Roommates and Grace in Mile End Kicks embody this quality.

In Roommates, Levack uses framing to visually chart Devon’s journey. Early on, she appears awkwardly positioned within group scenes, her body language tense and uncertain. As the film progresses, the camera begins to center her more deliberately, even as she resists being the “main character” of her own life.

Levack’s fascination with outsiders is deeply personal. “I’m really attracted to people that feel socially awkward, trying to feel cool but aren’t,” she says. These characters often sabotage themselves, making their eventual growth or implosion all the more compelling.

In Mile End Kicks, Levack explores another kind of coming-of-age—this time through music. The film draws inspiration from her own early experiences in the music industry, as well as a deep personal connection to Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill.

For Levack, that album was formative. “I heard it when I was eight years old and became completely obsessed,” she recalls. As she researched Morissette’s early career, she discovered a story of exploitation and reinvention that closely mirrored her film’s protagonist.

That parallel became the backbone of Mile End Kicks: a young woman navigating a toxic mentorship and ultimately finding her own voice.

One of the film’s most distinctive elements is its original music, created in collaboration with the band TOPS. Levack approached the process with meticulous care, determined to avoid the artificial feel that often plagues fictional bands on screen.

She came prepared with song titles, lyrical ideas, and detailed references, treating the music as seriously as any real-world release. The actors even learned to play their instruments, rehearsing together until they could perform live as a believable band.

“The goal was for the songs to genuinely be good,” Levack says. “Not just placeholders.”

Across both films, Levack demonstrates a clear artistic throughline: a fascination with complicated, often contradictory characters. Whether it’s a toxic friend who still evokes empathy or a protagonist who struggles to step into her own life, her work resists simplicity.

“I think complicated people feel the most cinematic,” she says.

Q&A with director Chandler Levack on her filmes Roommates and Mile End Kicks. Moderated by Mara Webster.

Roommates - When a hopeful, naive college freshman, Devon, asks the cool and confident Celeste to be her roommate, a blossoming friendship spirals into a war of passive aggression. Mile End Kicks - A 24-year-old music critic gets romantically involved with members of an indie band she decides to publicize.