Sundance 2025 Review: Hal & Harper
The mental instability of their single father forces Hal and Harper to grow-up quickly.
While their personal lives are mess one thing that brother and sister Hal and Harper can depend is their unwavering emotional support of each other; their codependency is due in part of being unable to rely upon parental stability which is the result of a having father who never regained his emotional footing after the death of his spouse.
Divided into eight 30-minute-long episodes, the self-financed television series written, directed and starring Cooper Raiff is an admirable effort that is a narrative mess and the performances are cartoonishly neurotic. A bizarre choice was to have Cooper Raiff and Lili Reinhart also play their child counterparts which is discombobulating to the viewer. There is a brief moment when we actually see a child actor portray Hal which makes one wish that was the case all along.
The real wasted talent is Mark Ruffalo who is not given much to work with and as a consequence, his performance also comes across as emotionally flat. The lighting and camerawork are uninspired as it retains the generic visual aesthetic of sitcom television. Perhaps it would have been best for Raiff not to have shouldered the entire production and to have shared the weight of the writing and directing with others so to get another perspective.
The 2025 Sundance Film Festival takes place January 23 to February 2, 2025, in person and online, and for more information visit sundance.org.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada; he can be found at LinkedIn.
Sounds like you didn’t care to think about the themes and characters in this show it all. This review is so surface level.