Mark Reviews Movies: S---HOUSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 15, 2020

First-time writer/director Cooper Raiff captures the potential misery, the low-key adventure, and the ample opportunities for personal growth of a couple days and nights at college. S---house isn't so much about its story. The setup is simple: Two relative strangers spend an intense night across and off campus learning about each other, and then, there's the fallout. Raiff is far more interested in the inner lives and external façades of these two people, and in the process of revealing that, he's also made a film that accurately recreates the atmosphere, freedom, assorted annoyances, and little joys of college life.

In addition to his work behind the scenes, Raiff also stars as Alex, a freshman at a college in Los Angeles. It's a big change of scenery from his home in Dallas and one to which Alex has yet to become accustomed. He's still calling and taking calls from his mother (played by Amy Landecker) and younger sister (played by Olivia Welch) on a daily basis—sometimes multiple times a day.

Lying in bed in his dorm room, where Alex's roommate Sam (Logan Miller) is usually sleeping off a night of drinking or working through a hangover, the freshman holds a stuffed animal from his childhood. The furry dog toy talks to him in subtitles, offering hollow advice on how to get over and condolences about his homesickness.

As we're introduced to Alex, Raiff also follows Maggie (Dylan Gelula), a sophomore who's an RA on Alex's dormitory floor. There are some similarities. During the day, Maggie is often alone, save for study time with friends, wandering the halls or sitting in her room with a little, pet turtle (although, unlike Alex's animal friend, hers is real).

She seems to be lacking some kind of connection, too. There are phone calls and online chats with a sister, but with an extra year and comparatively many more friends under her belt than Alex, Maggie actually does have a social life of hang-outs and parties, as unfulfilling as they seem to be.

The overwhelming mood here is of loneliness—silent and pained and seemingly inescapable. Raiff's most significant accomplishment in terms of controlling that tone is how the mood never actually overwhelms the film itself. It's a story about loneliness, but it's not a depressing one. There are too many recognizable and/or amusing situations and characters for that to be the case.

Take Sam, the roommate, and how his disdain for and suspicion of Alex is clear from the first moment, how it immediately escalates into insults and threats whenever alcohol is involved, and how there's this unspoken agreement that the two guys will put up with each other because there is no other choice (although that doesn't mean either has to like it). Note the way Alex and Maggie first meet, with him locked out of his room after a shower, standing outside the door in only a towel (and holding all of toiletry supplies). It's simple stuff, of course, but Raiff's attention to the little details pays off considerably in establishing the authenticity of the setting.

He's even better, perhaps, in his attention to the bigger details, specifically these characters and their relationships. The bond between Alex and Maggie begins after a party the two attend separately. He leaves his dorm room after a drunk Sam creates a particularly foul odor in the space, and she can't sleep after an encounter with a guy (who) finishes prematurely. Maggie heads down to the common room, where Alex has made a bed of a couch, and invites him up to her room for wine and conversation—and maybe a bit more, if it goes that way.

Describing the rest of this story is pretty simple. Alex and Maggie spend the rest of the night together—in her room (clothed and naked and, when the naked thing doesn't work out, clothed again), searching for Maggie's recently deceased turtle, walking across campus, stopping for an impromptu softball game with strangers, trying to make their way to a mountain on campus that would serve as a proper burial spot for the turtle. It's all an excuse, of course, for some companionship on an especially lonely night, and Raiff's screenplay uses the background of the little adventure as an excuse to change the backdrop on an extended, thoughtful, and wholly revealing conversation between these two characters.

That's it, but the discussion and its components are so effective in establishing these characters—their pasts, their secret hopes, their deepest fears, their most defining losses—and developing this relationship that the film doesn't need to be any more. We see the similarities between these two and, more importantly for the direction in which the third act goes, note their differences, with the most important one being the unstated or unheard expectation each one has for this encounter.

That distinction leads to the conflict in the third act, as Alex's obvious emotional immaturity and insecurity clashes with Maggie's desire to treat college as a way to get away from and forget all of the things that Alex cannot. Because Raiff's screenplay allows us to understand and sympathize with both of these characters, the resulting scenes are painful and discomforting—not only because of what happens and what is said, but also because we find it impossible to take a side in the disagreement.

Even though the resolution (an epilogue set a few years in the future) is a bit too simplistic for everything that has preceded it, S---house works. It's authentic in its setting and revels in the richness of its characters. What else do we need, really?

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