‘Hal & Harper’ - Review

Time doesn’t move the same way for everyone in Cooper Raiff’s new series, Hal & Harper. For Hal and Harper, time fractures the moment their mother dies. One sudden moment violently throws them into adulthood while leaving parts of them frozen in childhood’s amber. The eight-episode series, which premiered at Sundance and is now in search of distribution, captures this fractured sense of time. Actors Lili Reinhart and Raiff play their respective characters both as adults and as children after their mother’s death, while child actors portray who they were before loss rewrote their lives.

Growing up, I never saw death as the single, isolated, shattering event that it was for Hal and Harper. It was never sudden, only quietly present. In my high school’s high-stress environment, stories of recent academic-related suicides lurked as quiet threats. Those suicides weren’t just rumors; they were tangible and felt real, even if they only happened to kids we didn’t know personally. They transformed our fear of failure into something monstrous. At fifteen, I found myself talking friends out of self-harm, fumbling for language we didn't have yet. We treated death like another problem to solve, another test to pass. Building our own support systems, we convinced ourselves we were mature, wise even. But we were just kids playing at being adults. We understood only a shell of loss, not loss itself.

Harper (Lili Reinhart) carries herself with a similar kind of premature wisdom, but her wisdom comes from a place of real bereavement as opposed the abstraction I knew. Whether she’s playing her nine-year-old self with unsettling composure or her adult self, trapped in cycles of compulsive caretaking, Harper shows us what it means to learn too early that love often means carrying someone else’s pain. She knows death intimately; I only thought I did.

When Hal climbs through Harper's window at 3 AM for their ritual McDonald's run, we see the purest version of their dynamic. Their relationship exists in its own orbit, a codependency forged in the fire of shared grief. Raiff’s Hal is desperate to be seen, to matter, especially to his sister who spends most of her time with him. Their dynamic is a rare kind of intimacy, one born from absence or the constant threat of it, but which binds them closer together.

In high school, I spent years cultivating my own illusion of control over death through calculated attempts at cultivating comfort and closeness with those around me, carrying around false maturity like a badge of honor while identifying as the ‘therapist friend.’ But when, in college, a close friend of mine committed suicide, that illusion shattered. Death was no longer theoretical; death was real and completely beyond my grasp. All those moments I spent tricking myself into thinking I had a true understanding of loss were just performances. While Hal and Harper’s early confrontation with death forced them to grow up too fast, my confrontation was a rude awakening that taught me how much I’d failed to grow up at all. I was just playing pretend.

Hal & Harper nails the moments where our relationships with death and maturity reveal themselves as far more complicated than we’d like to admit. Raiff’s direction focuses on these nuances through the smallest details: the way Harper’s voice softens when she’s comforting someone, the slightly too-long hug between siblings, the way Hal shields himself with humor to keep real connection at arm’s length. These moments are grounded something achingly real, a portrait of survival that feels familiar to anyone who’s had their understanding of mortality upended.

For Hal and Harper, the result of facing death too soon is a state of arrested development. For me, it came from the arrogance of thinking I could outsmart it. In the aftermath of my friend’s death, I swung wildly between overcompensating with responsibility and regressing into childishness, finally forced to come face-to-face with how much emotional growth I’d skipped in my rush to seem “grown up.” The show evokes that pendulum swing with honesty, even if its characters’ starting point is different from mine, replicating almost an inversion of my experience. Seeing this struggle reflected on screen was a touching reminder that my own path is not as singular as I once thought.

In an era where television often mistakes shock for depth, Hal & Harper is its own kind of gem. Some shows entertain; others help us understand ourselves. Hal & Harper does both, creating something rare. It’s as artistically ambitious as it is emotionally honest. Whether trauma crashes into your life or slowly trickles in, real maturity isn’t about controlling it. It’s about realizing you never could.