In the US, this film goes by the name of Shithouse, the kind of title which implies a college movie in the Animal House tradition: all about getting drunk, getting laid, and occasionally puking. The blandly-renamed-but-eminently-more-marketable Freshman Year deals in all three traditions — but, in a refreshingly revolutionary move, suggests that they might not always be healthy.
For a lot of kids, leaving home for the first time with bad social skills, wobbly mental health and limited alcohol experience means the college experience can actually really suck. That’s certainly where we meet Alex (Cooper Raiff, on multi-hyphenate filmmaking duties), who has spent most of his term hiding in his dorm, forced to tolerate his obnoxious roommate Sam (Logan Miller) smoking weed — and, in one excruciating scene, shitting his pants — in the bed next to him.
As he admits to his mother in one of their regular tearful phone calls, Alex feels like “a new-born baby”: totally helpless with the sudden weight of adulthood thrust on him, and completely alienated in a stressful and confusing place. Raiff gives a heartbreaking and intensely vulnerable performance as a sensitive 19-year-old still figuring his brain out, possessing a raw awkwardness not seen since Elsie Fisher’s devastating turn in 2018’s Eighth Grade.
It’s rare to see young people depicted so honestly or so simply.
A sudden burst of self-imposed socialising sees Alex going to a pretty awful-looking house party. The party results in a couple of authentically terrible bedroom fumbles (including, arguably, the shortest and therefore funniest sex scene of the year). But it at least leads Alex to meet Maggie (Dylan Gelula, hugely impressive); over the course of a drunken evening, they make an unsuccessful attempt at sex, and then get to know each other, in that order.
Nearly an hour of running time is then devoted to their meet cute, as Freshman Year quickly evolves into a gorgeous hangout movie in the Linklater mould: a Gen-Z Dazed And Confused. Plot falls away, as Alex and Maggie wander around campus, swig from a $3 bottle of wine, flirt, share secrets from their past, emotionally expose themselves a little, and bury a recently passed pet turtle. The dialogue is light on substance but rich in realism: they’re talking about nothing, which makes it feel like everything.
It’s rare to see young people depicted so honestly or so simply — not to mention, as told by genuine young people. Raiff, who dropped out of college to complete the film, was just 23 when he wrote, directed, edited and starred in it; his clear talent and ability is, frankly, almost maddening. The film certainly owes a debt to the low-key indie shoulders it stands on (Jay Duplass, who shot a cameo that didn’t make the final cut, is an obvious influence), and it has the requisite shoegaze soundtrack to match the detached directing style. And some, admittedly, might find the earnestly romantic final act a little too neat. But it feels earned. This a college experience that takes it all in: from the lovestruck to the pants-shitters.
