Director Cooper Raiff has only been in the business for a few years, but he has ascended to indie darling status rather quickly, with his upcoming series Hal & Harper receiving rave reviews at Sundance this year. With just two feature-length films and now Hal & Harper, Raiff has honed a distinct tone that blends humor and earnestness. His first project, Shithouse is a sweet and unflinching look at college dating that is guaranteed to take viewers back through their own memories in a visceral way. But the honesty in this film is also a result of Raiff's being college-aged when he made it, and drawing directly from his own experience of the unique and often awkward social experiment that is college.

In Shithouse, Raiff plays Alex, a college first-year who has been struggling to make friends and dealing with homesickness. When we first meet Alex, he spends much of his time on the phone with his mom (Amy Landecker) and sister (Olivia Scott Welch) and having imaginary conversations with his stuffed animal. But then Alex hooks up with his RA Maggie (Dylan Gelula), and things begin to change. We follow Alex and Maggie over the course of a night of random sidequests around campus, as well as the uncertain aftermath in the following days as they try to figure out how they feel about each other.

Watching Shithouse post-college is a surreal experience that guarantees feeling seen and also cringing deeply inside as college memories come flooding back. Raiff throws us through a series of all-too-familiar situations, like awkward small talk with an Uber driver, rambling drunken conversations on campus paths lit up by fluorescent lamps, and offering to Venmo someone for half a bottle of wine. Part of why this movie feels so accurate is because Raiff made the film soon after dropping out of Occidental College to focus on making movies.

Raiff shot a short film version of Shithouse entitled Madeleine & Cooper during his undergrad spring break in 2018. According to an interview with his alma mater, he then tweeted one of his filmmaking heroes, Jay Duplass, and dared him to watch the short film. Duplass liked what he saw, and took a chance on Raiff, spearheading the production of the 22-year-old's first feature-length film. Raiff re-wrote the script, and they re-shot the film on a small budget with professional actors. Many shots from the film are actually on the Occidental campus. The result is a poignant story about the rollercoaster of college life that doesn't glamorize any of it.

For being Raiff's first film, there’s a lot that is impressive about Shithouse. The small budget and intimate scale of the sets do give it a student film vibe, but the film isn’t poorly written-- it’s genuinely funny. The dialogue is naturalistic, which we can see in the way Alex and Maggie’s conversations have the slightly off timing and meaningless tangents that you can only find in real life. There is also a solid dose of intentional cringe. In one scene, Maggie has been ignoring Alex's morning-after texts asking her if she wants to get breakfast burritos. In response, Alex proceeds to like every single one of Maggie's Instagram posts. Most of us have been through some version of this exchange, which we most likely have chosen to forget. But thanks to Raiff, we get to remember how embarrassing it was. The effect is that it feels like we are watching someone's journal entry come to life.

For all its awkward humor, Shithouse definitely has an emotional core. Maggie is an enigmatic character, who at first comes across more confident and unbothered than Alex, but as the night goes on, we see some of her deflections beginning to fail as she slowly lets her guard down. One of the sweetest scenes is when they decide to dig her dead turtle out of the dumpster and give him a proper burial on top of a hill. As long as you don't mind a potentially cringe-inducing trip down memory lane, Shithouse is a lovable gem you won't want to miss.