A homesick freshman, one loud party and a single sleepless night: that is the whole frame of Shithouse, the 2020 American comedy-drama that Cooper Raiff wrote, directed and stars in. Running one hundred minutes, it is a romance built almost entirely out of conversation.
What is Shithouse about?
Alex has been at college for months and still calls his mother every day. His roommate parties without him, the dorm hallways feel foreign, and the students around him seem to have cracked a code he never received. One evening he forces himself out of his room and over to a notorious fraternity house whose nickname gives the film its title. There he drifts into the orbit of Maggie, a resident adviser who has had a rough day of her own and simply wants company. The two wander the campus until dawn, trading confessions, jokes and the kind of half-truths people tell when they are nineteen. The morning after lands differently for each of them, and the rest of the film turns on whether a connection that felt enormous at three in the morning can survive daylight, texting and the ordinary cruelty of someone else's indifference.
About the cast
Cooper Raiff takes the lead role in his own film, with Dylan Gelula opposite him. The supporting cast includes Amy Landecker, Logan Miller, Olivia Welch, Abby Quinn, Joy Sunday and Ashley Padilla. Most scenes are two-handers, so the picture rests on the rapport between its central pair and on the small, awkward pauses the ensemble allows to breathe.
Context & significance
Raiff made Shithouse as a very young filmmaker, serving as writer, director and lead at once, and the result sits in a tradition of low-budget American campus stories that favour talk over plot. The brief here matters: it is tagged comedy, drama and romance, and it moves between all three without settling, often in the same scene. Unlike the raucous fraternity comedies its title might suggest, the film is quiet, slightly melancholy and more interested in loneliness than in hijinks. For K-Time's audience it offers a window on a specific American rite of passage, the first year away from home, told without gloss.
Watching Shithouse on Ktime
Shithouse is available on K-Time in its original English audio; no Persian dub or subtitle track is listed for this title. The page you are reading is open to everyone, while playback asks you to sign in to your K-Time account.