Shithouse (2020, Cooper Raiff) (Patreon)

69/100

Misleading rating (to go with the deliberately misleading title)—had Raiff come up with any sort of ending that's not absolute garbage, this would have been my film of the year, and I'm downright heartbroken that it's not. Overall conception's gutsy, disarming, possibly unprecedented (at least for a very young, presumably straight male filmmaker) in its raw vulnerability and blithe disregard for what society considers masculine behavior. While Shithouse—again, the title goes out of its way to create expectations that everything else in the movie actively works against—is frequently quite funny, with Raiff in particular capable of getting laughs just from the timing and delivery of a simple line like "Oh my gosh," at no point does it ridicule Alex's acute homesickness, his deep attachment to his mother and sister, or his propensity to cry at the slightest provocation. Even the fact that he talks to/with a stuffed animal gets introduced literally within seconds, in a matter-of-fact way, rather than functioning as a punchline. (Echoes Beginners' subtitled dog, and I guess Mills might be an influence here, temperamentally. But he was already nearly 40 when he started directing features. That a guy Raiff's age would go this route blows my mind.) We're talking here about a "college movie" in which a freshman dude gets invited to have sex by an attractive young woman and invents an excuse to ditch her so that he can call his mom. With that being taken completely seriously. Thought things had taken a more ordinary turn over the course of Alex and Maggie's long night together, but what happens thereafter is equally subversive, more or less imagining a disastrous day-after scenario for a Before Sunrise-style insta-romance—something not merely awkward or disappointing, but flat-out ugly, with neither party seeming the least bit admirable (she really is kinda mean, he oversteps his bounds by miles and has zero understanding of her as an autonomous being) but both registering as richly human in their confusion and consternation. 

Does that not sound great? It is great, right up until the last three or four minutes, when Raiff inexplicably trashes everything that he'd spent the previous hour-and-a-half carefully building. An L.A. Confidential-level miscalculation, so wrong as to be retroactively destructive. I'll give Raiff a little credit for at least recognizing that he needed to leap forward in time a couple of years, but it doesn't help much in the absence of anything more acute (in terms of the immediate aftermath) than the tossing-the-tank rapprochement. And Alex says things to Maggie in the epilogue that make me wonder whether Raiff might actually believe the deranged shit that Alex spews during their big fight earlier. I don't think so—there's way too much self-critical stuff here that plays like Hong by way of Modern Romance, scaled down to the mindset of a frightened teenager—but the alternative is that Raiff chickened out and went for the ostensible crowdpleaser, which is only slightly less dispiriting. I feel betrayed, and doubly betrayed since this is also the only film I can think of that not only features a discussion of colorblindness but has one character mention a specific anomaly that I share, viz. perceiving green traffic signals as white. (They don't look green to me at all. Not even a little. Must be the palest green imaginable.) Still, I'd recommend this without hesitation. It's so close to being truly singular.