The final episode of Cooper Raiff‘s eight-part series, “Hal & Harper,” opens with a dedication: “For parents and the parentified.” At its best, the show evokes that love and care for the struggles and anxieties of parenthood, and the arrested development that comes when children are forced to parent themselves. As a young filmmaker with two attention-grabbing features already under his belt—2020’s “Shithouse” and 2022’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth“—Raiff’s work has often dealt with the tensions of growing up and putting away childish things. But here it’s told with remarkable patience and self-assurance, even as Raiff often gets in his own way.

Told in elliptical, time-jumping fashion across decades, “Hal & Harper” holds its focus on a struggling family coping poorly with loss and trauma; we quickly clue in that the mother dies tragically when both kids are very young, freezing them emotionally in place. The titular kids are the jittery Hal (Raiff) and his older sister Harper (an incredible Lili Reinhart), first seen in their early twenties, still figuring their lives out. Hal feels like a manchild who’s coasting through college with a best friend who tells him that he’s “not, like, a person sometimes,” all raw nerves and people-pleasing eagerness.

Harper, meanwhile, is freshly out of college, toiling away at an entry-level desk job and in a six-year relationship with her first love, Jesse (Alyah Chanelle Scott), whom she can’t bring herself to leave, even though she’s already checked out. A fling with a coworker (Addison Timlin, also a producer) offers her the chance for something exciting and new. Still, she’s stuck: Stuck in the limbo of her existing connections with Jesse, Hal, and her guilt-ridden father (Mark Ruffalo). They’re all so dependent on each other in ways that can offer peace but also hold them back; Hal and Harper’s lack of boundaries, even in adulthood, quickly registers as unhealthy.

While the first two episodes cement the show’s montage-y, impressionistic nature—much of the show’s runtime plays out in airy intercuts set to weepy indie-folk needledrops from acts like Phoebe Bridgers and Waxahatchee—it’s at the end of ep 2 that we see one of Raiff’s more ambitious stylistic choices: We cut back to 2009, as Hal and Harper enter first and third grades. Instead of casting kids, the twentysomething Raiff and Reinhart play the roles instead; the former adjusts his physicality to play around with preteen clumsiness, while Reinhart’s Harper still smokes and makes jokes about drinking. “You really had to grow up way too fast,” Dad says to them and us, hammering home this conceit.

It’s a cloying, on-the-nose moment to sell the vibe, and “Hal & Harper” has a lot of these. When watched all at once, the show’s sleepy, waxy tone can sometimes grate, as the overwhelming gentleness of its presentation and the simplistic, fuzzy-wuzzy dramedy wear thin.

That attitude is all over Raiff’s work, especially “Cha Cha”; especially on screen, Raiff’s presence is somewhat of a weak point, as his wide-eyed enthusiasm can whittle away his more charming moments as an actor. His works feel singularly focused on the dissonance between childhood and adulthood, and the pull towards the simplicity of childhood to keep oneself safe.

“Hal & Harper” makes merry play with the divide between adults who can’t leave their childhoods behind and are a bit too grown-up to do childhood right. The beats that explore that frisson are some of the show’s most successful. The problem comes from the show’s awkward, stuttering structure. Because we flit back and forth so much in time, it’s hard to get a grasp on these characters or their conflicts, and they don’t get a chance to build organically.

Structuring a show achronologically should create purpose in those intercuts; alas, we’re left juggling two or three different conflicts at once that don’t resolve satisfactorily. Certain subplots, like Dad’s girlfriend (an underused Betty Gilpin) struggling against the possibility of their unborn child having Down’s Syndrome, feel tacked-on and perfunctory, and the broader question of “can they deal with selling their childhood home?” doesn’t ripple out boldly enough into their wider lives to feel important.

What elevates the show’s hazy presentation, though, is the performances of Reinhart and Ruffalo, each of whom finds remarkable grace notes in their thorny, complicated characters. Reinhart’s Harper feels like the adult of the family, for lack of a better term; she’s always had to take care of Hal and her father to some extent, and this moment in her life plays out like a deeply painful crossroads. She’s a fuckup, trapped in cycles of self-destructive behavior because she doesn’t know what she wants. Reinhart’s expressive face speaks volumes, whether it’s guilt, memory, or conflict, in ways the sparse, overly sentimental script doesn’t allow her.

Ruffalo, for his part, is often off in his own show, as the emotionally closed-off father who turns inward to deal with his trauma. It somewhat isolates his character from the rest of the show, but it gives him a beautiful showcase to mark his weathered, hangdog expression, filled with decades of grief and sorrow, in ways that resonate when he’s the focus.

When we deal with loss, time can seem to stand still. I know; as I type this, I am myself waiting to hear whether my maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family, will pass today. It’s one of those terrifying prospects that no amount of emotional fortification can truly prepare you for. In its final hour, especially, “Hal & Harper” captures the bittersweet nature of change and how closing one chapter can help you open up another. But perhaps that’s evidence enough that there’s a solid three-star movie’s worth of concept here, rather than stretching it out to a loose, thin five-hour television series.

Whole season screened for review. Premieres on MUBI October 19.

Interesting leading men and women dominate this unusual dispatch, one that gathers films that have almost nothing in common on paper, itself a testament to the variety of styles one can find at a festival as broad-reaching as TIFF.

The best of the three is the intense, unforgiving “Wasteman,” another evidence exhibit in the case that David Jonsson is one of the most remarkable actors of his generation. From “Industry” to “Rye Lane” to “Alien: Romulus” to this searing performance, he’s become someone who you don’t want to miss, no matter the project. The film around him sometimes falters by telling a relatively simple tale, but that simplicity allows both Jonsson and co-star Tom Blyth to do a lot of character work within the confined space of this intense prison drama.

Director Cal McMau, working from a script by Hunter Andrews & Eoin Doran, opens his film with a tone-setting bit of violence as we see a prison beatdown through what looks like a phone recording from a fellow inmate. The guys who run the UK prison that this film will never leave don’t take kindly to being double-crossed and they brutally beat a man, ending the attack by slamming a TV on his head. This means Taylor (Jonsson) is going to need a new cellmate, who comes in the form of Dee (Blyth, having a hell of a year with “Plainclothes” from Sundance and Claire Denis’ “The Fence,” also at TIFF). Taylor has survived this lawless place by disappearing, quietly doing favors for the power players as he numbs himself with drugs. Dee threatens that reality at the precise wrong time as Taylor learns that he may get early parole, possibly even reconnecting with the son he’s never known. For the first time in years, maybe ever, Taylor allows himself to hope, and Jonsson is simply phenomenal at conveying the arc of a man who sees a glimmer of light after living for so long in darkness.

Blyth knows to play the extrovert to Jonsson’s introvert, going broad with his sociopathic character. Even as Dee befriends Taylor, even helping him connect with his son, Blyth sells the kind of guy who has no allies that he won’t sell out to further his interests. That “Wasteman” arrives at a place wherein Taylor’s new ally becomes his greatest hurdle to a normal life again is a bit predictable, but there’s a spark that the film gains from these two young performers that’s never extinguished.

Speaking of great performers, we don’t talk enough about how Lesley Manville is one of the best working actresses. Sure, she got an Oscar nomination for “Phantom Thread,” but she’s one of those performers that’s quite literally never bad, and quite often great, even in a small part such as in last year’s Apple TV+ drama “Disclaimer.” She is simply spectacular in Kasia Adamik’s “Winter of the Crow,” dragging us along on this Kafka-esque journey into the dark heart of a country in violent turmoil. This is an unusual film that’s sometimes frustrating in its storytelling—it really sags at the hour mark—but Manville holds it together until the stunning final shot, one that’s among my favorites of the year.

Manville plays Dr. Joan Andrews, a clinical psychologist who has been asked to present her controversial research to a group of students at the University of Warsaw in December 1981. Historians will know what a tumultuous time this was in the Eastern European country, and Andrews becomes caught up in a wave of martial law designed to quell the Solidarity movement. Before she knows it, and without her luggage, she’s stranded in a completely dark, freezing, isolated Warsaw. She finds herself allied with an activist named Alina (a very good Zofia Wichłacz) and a witness to a murder, one that she documents with her handy Polaroid camera. Suddenly, Dr. Andrews isn’t just on the run, she’s got something that could shape world history.

Working loosely from a short story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, Adamik has made a Polish noir, a film that recalls Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in its telling of international intrigue and how an intrepid foreigner falls into it. Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography is so dark that it sometimes looks shot through gauze, but the approach works. You feel the cold in a place in which turning on a light could alert the authorities to your existence. I liked most of what “Winter of the Crow” was doing, despite that aforementioned lag, and then the wonderful Tom Burke (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) showed up for a truly memorable scene as a British ambassador and I was hooked for good.

I was never hooked on the frustratingly facile “Charlie Harper,” a movie that recalls last year’s TIFF premiere “We Live in Time” in its chronological gamesmanship in a genre (romantic drama) that doesn’t usually entertain it. While I felt that movie rose above its structure through the sheer power of its performers, I spoke to a number of people who hated the very construct of the film. Now I know how they feel. Although I’m not sure “Charlie Harper” would have worked any better told traditionally, either in structure or in non-fluctuating aspect ratios.

“I know how it started. I know how it ends. When I think about the middle, everything is scrambled,” says Harper (Emilia Jones, much better in HBO’s current “Task”). It’s only one of many lines in “Charlie Harper” that draws attention to itself in how it describes what you’re watching. There’s another about the power of nostalgia that gets said twice, just in case you missed it. Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper had a five-year relationship that included a move to New Orleans, her ascendance as a chef there, and his bout with alcoholism. All of it is superficial, manufactured highs and lows that highlight the strings of the screenwriter using these two performers as melodramatic puppets. It gets so drenched in pretension that the shifting aspect ratios for the different jumbled eras of their relationship just add to that overwritten and overdirected air.

Favorite songs, nights reading poetry, every conversation drenched in self-importance—too little of “Charlie Harper” actually feels as messy as human memory. The concept of a how capable we are of jumbling memories in the formative relationships of our lives—especially in our immature twenties—is a smart one, but the writing needed to work from character not from cliché, and even Jones, who’s always solid, gets lost in the cogs of this plot machine. She’ll move on and the debut filmmakers will certainly do so as well—there’s ambition here that I’m curious to see in a follow-up project—and everyone will look back on this film the way that Charlie and Harper do their relationship: a learning experience.