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Cooper Raiff's Hal & Harper is a bittersweet love letter to messy families

The filmmaker moves to TV (and another genre) with a MUBI series that co-stars Mark Ruffalo and Lili Reinhart.

By Caroline Siede | October 13, 2025 | 8:00am

Photo: MUBI

TV Reviews Hal & Harper

Cooper Raiff's Hal & Harper is a bittersweet love letter to messy families

For a minute there, Cooper Raiff seemed poised to become the king of indie rom-coms. The writer-director-actor burst onto the scene with Shithouse, a charming walk-and-talk college romance that brought some intimate humanity back to the genre. And he followed that up with Cha Cha Real Smooth, a riff on The Graduate in which he played a bar-mitzvah party starter opposite Dakota Johnson’s beguiling single mom. Between his sheepishly charismatic onscreen persona and his knack for writing humanistic dialogue, Raiff easily could’ve become a sort of Richard Linklater/Hugh Grant hybrid. But his next project is a leap in a whole new direction. Not only has he traded in indie movies for indie TV, he’s traded in stories about romantic love for an arguably even more complex topic. Raiff’s new eight-episode Mubi series Hal & Harper is all about family.

Of course, given that it’s a family where 24-year-old Harper Williams (Lili Reinhart) admits that she sometimes feels like the wife of her college-aged brother Hal (Raiff), perhaps the division isn’t so simple. Hal & Harper is specifically about sibling codependence—the way the people we grew up with can become the ones we cling to rather than evolve with. Also featuring Mark Ruffalo as Hal and Harper’s regretful father, the series is a funny, bittersweet, beautifully performed, sometimes meandering, but ultimately deeply moving ode to that old Leo Tolstoy observation that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

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In this case, the Williams are both unhappy and happy at the same time. They’re closer than a lot of families—offering waves of emotional support in between the hilarious back-and-forth banter that soundscapes their never-ending hangouts. (Hal spends more time at Harper’s place than his own college apartment.) Yet there’s so much that goes unsaid between them too. They barely ever talk about the tragedy that reshaped their family dynamic back in 2004. Privately, however, it’s all they ever seem to think about, especially when “Dad” announces that his girlfriend Kate (Betty Gilpin) is pregnant and he’s selling Hal and Harper’s childhood home to move in with her.

While Hal & Harper is filled with the humor, heart, and breezy banter of Raiff’s first two films, it’s also a more challenging, formally inventive project. Raiff may be back to playing a college student, but his filmmaking style has matured. (He wrote and directed all eight episodes, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.) An off-kilter, staccato editing style creates a tapestry of repressed memories, wandering minds, and juxtaposed lives. And Raiff makes one particularly big swing at the center of the series. He and Reinhart don’t just play their characters as adults, they play them as elementary schoolers too—dressed up in striped shirts and overalls but surrounded by actual kids, like a more dramatic take on Pen15.

It’s a tragicomic way to literalize the idea that Hal and Harper had to “grow up way too fast.” She was reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude and sneaking cigarettes by nine, while he was an anxious, excitable people pleaser by the time he was seven. At a time when their dad struggled to take ownership of his own life (and theirs), Harper stepped in as a co-parent to her younger brother. In one gut-punch of a flashback, Dad tosses out a story about something Harper used to do “when she was a kid,” as if he no longer sees her that way, even though she hasn’t even reached double digits yet.

No one here is villainized, however, even as their flaws are laid bare. Raiff is too much of a humanist for that. But he channels his natural onscreen charisma toward something slightly thornier, as Hal’s deep sensitivity to rejection colors his burgeoning relationship with his classmate Abby (Havana Rose Liu). Ruffalo, meanwhile, turns in what feels like a sequel to his breakout performance in You Can Count On Me, making Dad sensitive and selfish in equal measure and as prone to endearing grand gestures as he is to withdrawing entirely. And in a small but impactful supporting role, Gilpin captures what empathetic, non-codependent love can actually look like.

Yet it’s Reinhart who ultimately emerges as the true standout of the series. Harper’s arc begins with a love triangle—she’s crushing on her co-worker Audrey (Addison Timlin) even though she’s in a loving, long-term relationship with her girlfriend Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott). But her story eventually evolves into something much more far-ranging and gut-wrenching. While Harper’s life is put together on the outside, there are two decades of emotional repression bottled up behind her observant, wise-beyond-their-years eyes. Eventually, all that tightly wound energy has to boil over. And in her strongest work to date, the erstwhile Riverdale star leaves her heart on the screen in both big and subtle ways.

While the show lacks a bit of focus and structure in its early episodes, the hourlong finale (most episodes are 30 minutes) snaps everything into place. Hal & Harper builds from a dreamy, almost disorienting character study to a more pointed exploration of the weight we put on eldest daughters and the thin line between loving someone and smothering them. In another series, the idea that “there’s more to life than family” could be a sign that a character has their priorities in the wrong place. Here, however, it’s a reminder that sometimes loving someone means letting them go. That Raiff manages to explore all that in a series that still finds plenty of time to be funny and charming is a testament to the fact that rom-com honed storytelling skills can enliven so many genres.

Hal & Harper premieres October 19 on MUBI