Hal & Harper Review: Lili Reinhart anchors bittersweet, sweeping family-snapshot

The titular siblings of Hal & Harper are inseparable, their co-dependency unmistakable. Hal (Cooper Raiff) is constantly perky and animated, relying a tad too much on his elder sister, Harper (Lili Reinhart🅠). She displays the occasional grouse but ultimately ungrudgingly remains one he can fall back on practically anything. A long-delayed college assignment? Sure, she will take it up. He crashes at her place at any time. She sets aside her inconveniences. Hal & Harper, written and directed by Raiff, establishes textures of their relationship with instant ease, the sort of pleasurable, fractious familiarity that can only come with knowing your characters like the back of your hand.

The series opens with their father (Mark Ruffalo🍸), referred throughout as “Dad”, informing he’s selling their childhood house. He is also having a child with his live-in partner, Kate (Betty Gilpin). This development is situated alongside the twin, folding tracks of the siblings. Harper has been straining to stay invested in her relationship with her girlfriend, Jesse. Instead she’s been gravitating to her colleague, Audrey. Neither is Hal able to find a foothold in any equation outside his long-time best friend. He keeps scurrying back to his sister in the guise of consoling her in a crisis but implicitly demanding she look after him.

🐷Raiff takes his sweet time in building the series, drawing us into the sibling-world with care and deepening intimacy. There is no jerky, hyper-energetic progression, though the series fluidly weaves in and out of a decade of witnessing the family navigate unprocessed grief. Hal and Harper’s mother killed herself, driving off a bridge. In a vast yarn of flashbacks, leaping between their adolescence in the mid-2000s and the present day, we are made privy to not so much what precipitated the mother’s decision as its elongated fallout. Dad starts drifting, barely holding himself together through depressive spirals. To quiet, devastating effect, Ruffalo plumbs the debilitating anguish of a man desperately trying to be emotionally present—as a father, and eventually, husband to Kate. “Where are you?” She asks him, as he sits by her, his mind however forever roving elsewhere.

🌃What are the embers trauma and abandonment shoot in their wake? Can one wholly isolate oneself, or pretend to emotionally leave it unspoken, while marching ahead into the future and new relationships? The series takes a simultaneously gentle, hard look at the cyclicality of trauma as it manifests in newer shapes, profoundly altering configurations of self, desire. Grief never really washes out. If left unattended, it carves a gash into what one projects into other relationships. In denial, trauma serrates dimensions of expectations. Everything stowed away, unsaid and buried, circumscribes behavioral patterns.

⭕Raiff sketches these traces in the central trio with immense warmth and compassion. Yes, the conceit of Raiff and Reinhart also essaying the siblings’ elementary-school selves hovers dangerously close to an overkill. Like all smart narrative tricks, this one too ultimately skirts being an indulgence. We get that both the siblings struggled with making friends in school, felt like outliers in peer groups and didn’t really get invited to birthday parties and fun outings. While Hal isn’t reluctant to try as much as he can to insert himself, Harper is more reserved. The series devotes too much time to these flashbacks without extending layers of social discomfort, alienation and feeling waylaid by their father. Yes, we get the rare exceptionalism of him bunging in impromptu adventure stabs. Hal is happy to jump in; Harper is more guarded. These sections could have done with considerable whittling. Luckily, Raiff pulls the series towards other entwining threads. We watch the family through the shifting light of a prism, the past’s emotional weight hanging low and heavy on their current situation. There’s no running from it.

🔴Rambling over eight episodes, Hal & Harper ambles along at a subdued trot. The pacing is even-tempered, earnestly measured to each character’s exasperation with the other. None of it feels laden with artifice, neither is a beat or an arc pressed too firmly to crank out a specific emotional response. Raiff is wary of stylized flourishes, keeping the tone modest, grounded. Hence, each character’s tucked-away resentment, grievances, kerbed aspiration comes resonantly alive. But it’s especially Lili Reinhart stopping you in the tracks with her pitch-perfect balance between Harper’s practised restraint and newer desires leaking out. There’s so much of herself she’s allowed to wane, her wishes and impulses, while being overly vigilant about the needs of others, be it Jesse or her brother. Reinhart nails every anxious note of Harper’s fearing to upset others, thereby discounting her own feelings. By the end of this emotionally rich series, you wouldn’t want to part with this family who discover—stumbling through flaws and hurt—ways of having each other’s back.

Debanjan Dhar is covering Sundance Film Festival 2025 as part of the accredited press.