‘Hal & Harper’ Review: A Messy, Tearful, and Beautiful Look at a Codependent Family (MUBI)

Emotional and aching, sad in a deep, resonant way but also hopeful and warm, Hal & Harper must be one of the most tearful series ever made—both for the audience and for its characters, who spend a good part of its eight episodes crying. It’s the story of a family forever marked by the death of the mother of the two siblings who give the show its title, a story told like a jigsaw puzzle across its melancholy chapters.

As in his previous films, Shithouse and Cha Cha Real Smooth, Cooper Raiff writes, directs, and stars—though here, the emotional core belongs less to Hal, his character, than to Harper, played by Lili Reinhart. The two siblings share a bond that’s intimate, codependent, and seemingly unbreakable. Now in their twenties, they still lean on each other the same way they did growing up. Not only because of their mother’s death, but because their father (Mark Ruffalo, who cries his heart out too) fell into a deep depression afterward, barely managing to care for them.

They grew up so close that Hal still sleeps most nights at Harper’s house, even though he technically has his own room at college, where he’s finishing his senior year. She’s older, with a steady job and a long-term girlfriend named Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott), but her main priority seems to be her inconsistent brother—always in need of affection and support he doesn’t know how to give back. Hal tries dating Abby (Havana Rose Liu), but ends up mistreating her, apparently without realizing it, too distracted by his sister to focus on anyone else. Meanwhile, Harper’s own relationship with Jesse starts to crumble when she’s drawn to Audrey (Addison Timlin), a divorced coworker with two kids.

Still, their romantic lives are just one thread in a larger tapestry that centers on the family itself. The first major conflict in the present comes when their father, now expecting a baby with his younger partner Kate (the extraordinary Betty Gilpin, of GLOW), decides to sell the family home where the siblings grew up. That looming sale triggers a flood of flashbacks that Raiff edits so restlessly and intrusively they stop feeling like flashbacks at all, instead forming a kaleidoscopic parallel timeline.

Through this jittery, overloaded editing—the show’s biggest liability—Hal & Harper revisits key stages of the past: when the siblings are small and their mother has just died (2004), and later, in 2009, when they’re in elementary school and their father is too broken to take care of them. In a bold and somewhat strange choice, Raiff has the adult actors play the siblings even in the 2009 scenes, underlining how quickly they had to grow up and become responsible, especially Harper.

This constant movement through time yields a show full of tenderness and insight—a sensitive look at the small, defining moments that make and unmake a family, filling it with fear, guilt, grief, and the occasional hard-won joy. Raiff sometimes seems intent on sabotaging the delicate magic he’s created. His hyperactivity—as director, editor, and actor—can feel overwhelming. He rushes from scene to scene without letting them breathe, overuses montage sequences set to indie tracks (by Phoebe Bridgers, Waxahatchee, Adrianne Lenker, Alex G., and others), and repeats visual ideas until they lose impact. But the strength of the drama and the cast’s emotional truth carry the series through its rough spots, often in spite of Raiff’s restless hand.

One can’t help but feel Raiff missed the chance to make an exceptional series. All the dramatic ingredients were there—the finely tuned family tension, the moral and emotional ambiguity, the unsettling sibling codependence, the second and third chances, the anguish and deep bonds that tie everyone together, including the new additions to this messy but lovable clan. But he didn’t quite trust the material enough to let it breathe and unfold naturally. By throwing everything in at once, he risked undermining the gem he had.

Even so, his cast—and his undeniable gift for dialogue and for capturing natural, everyday moments—pull the series through with open-hearted sincerity. Just watching Ruffalo’s wounded, heavy-souled face (by now a synonym for heartbreak, his sad-bear demeanor both familiar and devastating) or Gilpin’s deeply empathetic turn as his partner and soon-to-be mother of his child, is enough to stir recognition and emotion in anyone who’s ever been part of a family that’s struggled to stay whole.

Still, the MVP of Hal & Harper is Lili Reinhart—an actress I hadn’t paid much attention to before, though she’s well-known from Riverdale. Her performance is the heart of the show: a young woman trying to hold together a family that’s constantly breaking apart before her eyes while fighting to carve out a life of her own. In a performance both tender and quietly shattering, Reinhart —who looks like she could be Greta Gerwig’s little sister—embodies that aching paradox of wanting to take flight while still clutching the very people who keep you grounded. It’s a performance that doesn’t just move you; it quietly lingers, like a bruise that refuses to fade.