Hal & Harper: The unusual, short miniseries that explores family trauma.

First the bad: Hal & Harper could be a movie. This miniseries, created by Cooper Raiff, director of the very curious Cha Cha Real Smooth , is small enough to fit into two hours. But low-budget American arthouse cinema is a highly competitive battle. For every Anora and every The Brutalist, there are dozens of works that only make it onto the festival circuit. I could name a few here, but I have no need to pour vinegar on an open cut.

A series like Hal & Harper has a better chance of reaching its audience. At least in Spain, there are more people subscribed to platforms ( Hal & Harper can be seen on Movistar Plus+ ) than there are people with easy access to a theater showing Anora , The Brutalist , or Bird . Films that aren't seen don't exist.

And the series.

Now for the good stuff: if you're going to do a writer-led series, make it like Hal & Harper . Don't compromise your idea, don't sell yourself short for a potential audience that might ignore you, don't believe those who say television doesn't allow for shows like this. They're right, and at the same time, they're wrong. I can think of a thousand things I could say to Cooper Raiff to make his show more... easy? But then I realize that Hal & Harper isn't that weird, that secretive, that difficult. It's just different.

In Hal & Harper , siblings Hal ( Cooper Raiff ) and Harper ( Lili Reinhart ) can't seem to grow up. Or not want to. Then an external event upsets their precarious life balance: their father ( Mark Ruffalo ) is about to become a father again with his new wife, Kate ( Betty Gilpin ). This reopens the wound left by the disappearance of Hal and Harper's mother and how it plunged the siblings and their father into a strange emotional limbo from which they haven't emerged and may never emerge. Locked in a cage of guilt and trauma, but also cowardice, the three of them cope with their emotional wounds as best they can . Healing them is urgent, especially for a man who is already mature and distressed by the idea of ​​not knowing how to care for a baby, his own, who hasn't even been born yet.

Hal & Harper tells this story in several time periods. Times that, like memories, blur and alter one another. To achieve this, Cooper Raiff employs a highly risky device: both he and Lili Reinhart play the children of Hal and Harper. And the adult Hal and Harper.

Mark Ruffalo, with a barely-there characterization that underlines Raiff's narrative device, is Hal & Harper 's most obvious selling point. He's a star, but also a highly reliable performer who doesn't collapse in a series that demands a highly dangerous acting intensity. Watching him crumble in front of two actors in their late 20s playing seven-year-olds is fascinating . Because his collapse is moving and, above all, realistic. Hal & Harper knows that in these moments it must appeal to emotions without abandoning its very cerebral approach.

He gets it.

Atypical and small series struggle to find their place. Even with a familiar face on the poster, because, for starters, that poster will never be hung anywhere. What's more, do series posters still exist? Squashed between buzzy premieres, the few low-budget arthouse television series struggle to integrate into our lives. Besides, it's a fact of life that the intimate traumas of a father and two sons barely stand out among zombies and superheroes . But series like Hal & Harper and authors like Cooper Raiff do have a place. If we make it for them, of course.