Oh, Hi!, the new dark comedy from director Sophie Brooks, begins in classic rom-com territory, with young couple Iris and Isaac (Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman) en route to an idyllic upstate farmhouse AirBnB for a romantic weekend getaway. Though relatively early in their relationship, the pair seem to be made for each other, singing along to the Dolly and Kenny parts in “Islands in the Stream” and trading inside jokes like they’ve been together forever. The sex is great, and they’re comfortable enough together to spend the afternoon quietly reading in each other’s company. Even their foibles, as when Isaac accidentally backs the car into a farmstand and is forced to buy an entire pallet of strawberries, are charming. One can almost sense Iris thinking in the back of her mind: Someday, we’ll tell our kids about this.
One part of the trip they probably won’t tell their kids about: the locked bedroom closet, which Iris jimmies open, filled with elaborate and expensive S&M gear. The pair agrees to leave well enough alone, but after a sufficient amount of good whiskey they decide to give it a whirl. It’s only in the afterglow that things take a turn for the uncomfortable, as it becomes clear that Isaac and Iris have very different ideas of the seriousness and exclusivity of their relationship. Apoplectic to realize that she’s little more than her dream man’s side piece, Iris makes an executive decision: she leaves Isaac handcuffed to the bed while she brainstorms a way to convince him they were meant to be together. What could go wrong?
Oh, Hi! roughly takes the form of a classic Hollywood screwball comedy, of the sort that Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant might have made had Will Hays never been born. Iris is the wild-eyed, dizzy dame, frantically running amok through the farmhouse trying to think up new ways to win her man (“Let me make you breakfast!!”). Isaac, meanwhile, is the seething straightman, trying to keep his cool in the thrall of a woman who he can’t be positive won’t try to stab him. At its best, the film approaches a manic comic intensity, especially once Iris enlists her unwitting best friends (Geraldine Viswanathan and John Reynolds) to help her out of the mess she’s created of her romantic getaway. When it works, it’s hard not to laugh.
Unfortunately, Oh, Hi! doesn’t quite know whether it wants to be a bedroom farce, a jet-black comedy, or an ain’t-it-the-truth film about modern romance. For every moment of inspired outrageousness, there’s a beat which suggests the film believes it’s much more down-to-earth than it actually is. It’s clear that Brooks has genuine affection for her characters even at their worst, which is admirable, but also somewhat at odds with the text. Isaac is an asshole for leading Iris on, and Iris is crazy for imprisoning him for a weekend, and while it’s far from necessary for characters in a dark comedy to be noble people, it feels as though the film loses track of this fact. By the time it reaches its conclusion, it’s tough not to feel that both have been let off the hook a little too easy.
One thing that’s not up for debate is the performance of Gordon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Brooks. Gordon has been a comic scene-stealer for the better part of the decade (her most prominent role so far is probably on The Bear, which I swear I’ll catch up with one of these days), and here she makes a credible bid for Leading Lady status. Iris is at the center of nearly every scene (save for an amusing just-between-bros chat with Lerner and Reynolds), and she commands the screen with Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl energy. Iris is a flawed character (to say the least), but Gordon keeps us rooting for her even as her actions verge into plainly criminal territory. I look forward to her next film, both in front of and behind the camera.
Watching Oh, Hi!, I was reminded of two other recent “anti-rom-coms”: the dominatrix two-hander Sanctuary and this year’s sexbot-gone-rogue comedy Companion, both of which put similarly cockeyed spins on the traditional romantic power struggle. Those films, however, have clear theses— Sanctuary about the interplay between romantic and financial capital, Companion about the entitlement of the techbro/fuckboy demographic— where Oh, Hi! second guesses itself and ends up in a conceptual muddle. I laughed out loud several times watching Oh, Hi!, and would probably recommend it to someone looking for a fun-enough night at the movies, but the more I considered it, the more it seemed to evaporate into the air. Though amusing and clearly personal, Oh, Hi! would have benefited from handcuffing itself to the typewriter for one last draft.
Oh, Hi!
2025
dir. Sophie Brooks
94 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Capitol Theatre, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and AMC Boston Common and South Bay
