The Crushing Weight of Love & Insecurity in Cooper Raiff's Shithouse
Finally a college movie for the rest of us! No, I’m not talking about your cliche Greek life jocks or insufferable horn-dog geeks, I’m talking about those of us who spent their so-called “best years” mostly talking on the phone with their parents, eating take-out alone in their rooms and crying in the shower. Perhaps if I had had Shithouse (2020) I wouldn’t have felt so alone. As it is, I already feel slightly more justified in my crappy college experience knowing that this won SXSW’s Grand Jury Prize–clearly this experience resonates more than our media typically reflects.
Despite its censor-worthy name, Shithouse is as disarmingly tender as its main character. Starring, directed, and co-edited by newcomer Cooper Raiff, the film follows Alex as he struggles through his first year of college and all of the depression that comes with leaving an otherwise cozy childhood nest. When we first meet him, Alex is having a silent conversation in bed with a stuffed animal while his jerky roommate actively ignores his presence. He feels crushingly alone and desperately homesick, struggling not only with his lack of friends, but with the guilt of missing out on everyday interaction with his mother and sister. Raiff plays Alex with the perfect balance of good-natured self-awareness and delicate naivety; while he might seem almost too wholesome to be true in comparison to most college-aged men, his complete and utter sincerity strikes the perfect balance between being endearing and fatiguing.
Alex’s dorm RA Maggie (Dylan Gelula) learns this quickly when she invites him back to her room and he hesitates, asking her outright if she’s inviting him over for “kissing and sex.” After an initially awkward physical encounter–Alex apologizes for being unable to get all of his “blood out of his head”–the two strike a much more satisfying mental connection as they spend the night drinking wine and confessing truths to each other. Alex is horrified to find out that Maggie didn’t bury her dead turtle after finding it dead in its tank earlier that morning. He takes her on a dumpster diving recovery mission that eventually leads them through campus and into downtown LA, making new friends as they go. Their conversation throughout floats to the inevitable discussion of death, God, and their parents–a youthful smalltalk ritual that’s far more revealing than your typical insecure teen tends to realize after a couple of beers.
Shithouse truly thrives in its recognizable and thoughtful dissection of college-aged worries and social dynamics. Like most young lovers, Alex and Maggie take more stock in the ease of their initial connection than they do in their overt differences. Alex is crushingly sentimental, coming from a fairly idyllic home life that grew closer and stronger after the death of his father. Maggie has more of a chip on her shoulder, having been estranged from her mentally abusive father since her parents acrimonious divorce. Between their naturalistic dialogue and the camera’s intimate focus on expressions, you can’t help but feel a level of warmth towards both characters and their precariously struck balance in the world. Yet as the sun rises on our two lonely hearts, Maggie wakes up to a terrible hangover and what she now feels was a regretful night of drunken oversharing.
Where most college-centric films tend to indulge in wish fulfillment, Raiff instead focuses on the miscommunications that arise when you put your trust in these sort of fantasy tropes. Where Alex sees a genuine connection between two lost humans, an immediate intimacy and two voids to be filled with love, Maggie saw a drinking buddy and some red flag potential to reopen an abandonment wound that’s never fully healed. It quickly becomes clear this budding opposites-attract romance can’t withstand the crushing power of youthful insecurity. Alex spends most of the next day bombarding Maggie with too-much-too-soon text messages, in turn making Maggie feel her only option is to coldly ignore him in public. When they finally come to blows the next night at a house party, Maggie rightfully calls Alex out on putting unfair expectations on her while he struggles to comprehend why she can’t just be honest about what they had. Where the previous night showcased our two main characters at their best, this night becomes a parallel introduction of them at their worst; Alex becomes an overbearing man-child hellbent on his expectations, while Maggie’s shown as recklessly hurting others in her childish pursuit to prove she’s an adult.
That love has no set universal definition is a lesson you’d wish more young adult films tackled. For Maggie, love, intimacy and pleasure are three separate concepts; her definition of love is tied into the idea that more you mix the three the more you get hurt. Alex defines love through his idealization of childhood, the sort of dime-a-dozen hugs and other easy comforts that a loving family openly exchanges. For him, to avoid intimacy is to deny both a vital need and an objective truth. It’s only when these characters experience each other at their worst, that they’re then able to acknowledge these differences and begin to grow a true relationship together. After seeing the worst of himself through Maggie’s eyes, Alex, in a truly touching moment, gathers up the strength to tell his mother he needs to stop relying on her support so much. Maggie, meanwhile, slowly lets down her ‘cool girl’ guard in order to embrace something more akin to Alex’s unabashed sincerity.
While I certainly think the film might have been elevated without the optimistic ending, call me cynical, I can’t overstate how refreshing this was to watch–especially for a genre I normally can’t stand. It almost makes up for all of the years of guys-just-wanna-get-laid college movies I’ve been forced to watch in the name of ‘comedy’ and ‘showing up for a party where you don’t want to be the one buzzkill.’ Really I can only point to one flaw in this film and that is its terrible choice of title card font–even a low budget film can do better than Helvetica, man.
Shithouse is out now on VOD and in select drive in theaters.
