Cooper Raiff's Shithouse

Every week, I ask the tnmn community for film recommendations in an arbitrary category. Last week's category was movies based on a true story. To find out who won, vote on this week's featured submissions for boat movies.

Reply to this email with your recommendation and why we should watch it. Include your first name and last initial. I’ll feature six favorites in next week’s vote, and the remainder in the honorable mention section. For duplicates, I’ll include up to five names and pick the best quote provided.

Note: If the movie doesn't comply with the category, I will sever ties with my father without explanation. He’ll be confused because he’s done nothing wrong. We have an exceedingly healthy relationship. I aim to take him in when he is older and care for him. I’ve always imagined this will be a profound experience. I, the cared for, will become the caretaker. You’ll rob us both of this deeply affecting experience. Instead, our relationship will be nothing more than a casualty of your disregard for basic instructions. So, ya know. Follow the category.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

Alex is having a hard time adjusting to college, so he goes to a party.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

▶ College stuff. Parties. Drinking. Throwing up. This movie captures that sort of college experience with surprising fidelity.

▶ Two-handers. That is, when films are focused primarily on two main characters. Shithouse is an intimate, conversational love story.

▶ Boyish protagonists. The writer-director and leading man, Cooper Raiff, is remarkably proficient at affably playing a childish, naive romantic. It’s easy to imagine his character reading as annoying in the wrong actor’s hands.

What I liked about it.

At the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Apple acquired the global distribution rights to writer-director Cooper Raiff’s sophomore effort, Cha Cha Real Smooth, for $15 million.

Only two years earlier, Raiff’s feature debut Shithouse — a sweet movie about college and companionship and love — won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW. It shares many of the same elements that made Cha Cha Real Smooth so successful; including a charming performance from Raiff himself.

SXSW 2020, though, was one of the first major film events to be cancelled due to COVID. And so, Shithouse may have lost out on its moment.

In the vein of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, or an episode of Joe Swanberg’s Easy, the picture feels quite grounded. It moves with the cadence of a pleasant, meandering conversation.

Raiff’s screenplay and dialogue lacks the superficial varnish that so often prevents romantic comedies from ringing true. Instead, each of the leads is conflicted, confused, tired, and a little bit drunk for the majority of the film. Both characters are strong-willed existentialists whom many of us might remember from our younger days.

This messy stuff — this is Raiff’s sweet spot. Where he excels both comedically and dramatically, as a writer, director, and actor.

So, in Shithouse, there is no suave male protagonist who knows just what to say and when to say it. Instead, you get Raiff’s Alex. A naive, emotionally exposed freshman college student, helplessly homesick. Raiff’s performance has this disarming rhythm to it that endears you to him throughout the film’s runtime. A dog wagging his tail, practically.

Dylan Gelula, who plays opposite Raiff for much of the film, effortlessly supplies her character a pajama-wearing, cool-resident-assistant energy that justifies Alex’s infatuation with her.

All this — coupled with Rachel Klein’s far-out and off-center cinematography — makes the film feel down-to-earth and impeccably true to its collegiate source material.

A time that pairs freedom and existentialism with paralyzing anxiety and mundane living quarters. And a time that so often places a doofy, homesick romantic like Alex in a dorm room with a snoring, drunk roommate unable to control his own bowels.

While there will always be a place for Animal House and every cheap impression of it that followed, Shithouse’s emotionally unafraid, brazenly sentimental version of college is a refreshing take on the subject.

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat”.

▶ In 2018, Cooper Raiff shot Madeline and Cooper at Occidental College — a 50-minute short film starring Raiff and his girlfriend — with equipment he borrowed from the college (without permission). He tweeted a link to the final cut to Jay Duplass and said: ‘Bet you won’t click on this link and then email me after.’ Duplass watched the film, emailed Raiff, and started helping him polish the screenplay. This screenplay would eventually become Shithouse.

One great line of dialogue from the film.