Sundance TV Review: ‘Hal & Harper’ is Cooper Raiff’s Next Great Project, Paired with a Superb Lili Reinhart

Few filmmakers have begun their careers in such auspicious but curious ways as Cooper Raiff. His first feature, Shithouse, debuted at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival just as the pandemic was starting, and his follow-up, Cha Cha Real Smooth, was also intended to be seen in-person but ended up as part of Sundance’s 2022 edition, which at the last minute also went virtual. Now, as people are again gathering together in movie theaters, Raiff is back at Sundance – for the first time in the flesh – with a true passion project, the TV series Hal & Harper, which showcases what he does best in an entirely new and quite extraordinary way.

Hal (Raiff) and Harper (Lili Reinhart) are siblings who couldn’t be closer. Neither really has their life together, and they spend much time in each other’s company, verging on a questionably appropriate relationship that might rub others the wrong way if they didn’t understand just who these people are. When they learn that their father (Mark Ruffalo), with whom they’ve had a complicated relationship over the years, is selling their childhood home as he prepares to have a baby with his much younger girlfriend (Betty Giplin), Hal and Harper are drawn to their past and to dwell on the formative moments they may not have entirely understood that have come to shape them.

After Apple TV+ acquired Cha Cha Real Smooth, ads were run during the 2022 Tribeca Festival that billed it as the next CODA and emphasized Raiff’s work as something deeply rooted in nostalgia and wonder. There’s a sense of that here, as the year in which a given scene takes place is frequently shown on screen but it feels oddly devoid of a standard or straightforward timeline. One of the elements that further grounds it in no moment in particular is that Raiff and Reinhart portray their younger selves when they’re seen in elementary school, a more serious version of the premise of Pen15 which is both disorienting and extremely informative to how these two siblings still very much hold on to the children they once were and perhaps still are.

Raiff once again casts himself in the lead roles in his projects, and it’s an approach that has worked tremendously well so far and continues to do so. Hal is unserious and charming, and it’s particularly compelling to see him as he tries to woo a fellow student played by Havana Rosa Liu, a standout from Bottoms and Mayday, since they have terrific chemistry. Reinhart is just as watchable as someone who doesn’t really know how to navigate relationships and tends to overcorrect in a dramatic way when she makes mistakes. Ruffalo, in a much more reserved performance than his recent Oscar-nominated work in Poor Things, offers a contemplative portrait of a broken man never really sure how to show up for his children. Though her role is smaller, Gilpin is great as always.

This show feels very authentic and sincere, not concerned with major plot twists or even a large ensemble, instead tightly focused on these two people and how their family dynamics have led to stunted adulthood. Each roughly half-hour episode feels dreamlike, as if its characters are only remembering certain moments from their lives and skipping over all the rest. Sundance is the perfect platform for Raiff to try this new medium, and like what he’s done before, it’s a resounding success. Hal & Harper, best compared to a more somber version of Casual, is captivating and compelling, a haunting look at the reverberating effects of small decisions and how people move past trauma and roadblocks to find a bearable way to move forward.

Series Rating: 8/10