The new film, Oh, Hi!, hardly seems like a conventional rom-com at first blush. When Isaac (Logan Lerman) and Iris (Molly Gordon) take what seems to be their first couple’s vacation over a sunny weekend in upstate New York, their sex-fueled conversations come to a screeching halt when Isaac reveals he not only disagrees on whether they decided to be exclusive, but he’s not interested in a relationship at all.
Upset and a little drunk, Iris leaves Isaac handcuffed to a bed post-coitus and post-argument and, fueled by more alcohol, decides to keep him tied up to give herself time to convince Isaac that he actually does want a relationship. Under different circumstances, the premise is ripe for an erotic thriller, but under Sophie Brooks’s direction, Oh, Hi! is both sharply clever and surprisingly heartfelt.
We get our first glimpse of the trouble in Isaac and Iris’s romance when they stop at a strawberry stand along the road. The woman who runs the stand immediately begins flirting with Isaac and, though he denies it when Iris brings it up in the car later, he flirts right back. With a different tone and different actors, the comedy here could be horribly uncomfortable. Instead, the woman’s directness is almost broadly comic and the moment seconds later, when Isaac accidentally crashes Iris’s car into the stand as they try to leave, only emphasizes that. In fact, much of the film’s comedy is built on big, absurdist beats, from David Cross as a creepy neighbor to a montage of Iris telling Isaac about her childhood in minute detail.
Still, while Oh, Hi!‘s comedy tends broad, it works because of the way that tone is contrasted with the genuine emotions and conversations the characters have. Not for nothing, Gordon and Lerman have palpable chemistry. Isaac and Iris are sexy and playful. Their relationship is new, but as we watch them banter over books/movies or bend to support each other, we can see how their relationship could mature. Those dynamics only become more pronounced and profound when we meet Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Kenny (John Reynolds), Iris’s couple friends who quickly come embroiled in her drama with Isaac. For Iris, Max becomes a sounding board. Someone to both support her in her hurt and try to talk some sense into her. For Isaac, Kenny is the mature if goofy partner Isaac can aspire to be. In both cases, the characters both expand the potential comedy and ground our main characters to help keep them from becoming cliches.
Indeed, even at her most neurotic and unhinged, Iris is never someone we don’t root for. Her reaction to Isaac’s declarations are extreme, but they make sense within the film’s internal logic. When she has a moment of clarity after hours of furious Googling ways to convince Isaac to love her, she’s stopped from un-cuffing him by the sight of him peacefully asleep, reaffirming that maybe she can convince him once he eventually wakes up. Later, when she, Max and Kenny are discussing the consequences of letting him go, the threat of jail time and even deportation in Max’s case pushes them to increasingly irrational solutions. The longer the film goes, the messier and more complicated to solve the situation becomes and it almost begins to feel like Brooks and Gordon (who co-wrote the script) have dug themselves too deep into a premise they can’t escape.
However, while at least some of the film’s pleasures come from watching Brooks and Gordon write themselves out of that hole, what makes Oh, Hi! such a compelling dark rom-com is the frank conversations and emotions it manages to explore. A more conventional rom-com or a more conventional thriller would end, respectively, in complete absurdity or violence to free its characters from the predicament they’ve put themselves in. Likewise, while another film might paint Isaac as a villain we love to see punished, he is merely emotionally stunted here. Certainly, he can be manipulative and a little cruel as he tries to convince Iris to let him go, but he is also a captive after all. Instead, as it has for its full runtime, the film threads the needle between taking its stakes seriously and finding a clever way to make comedy out of a bad romance. The result is something unexpectedly thoughtful that acknowledges both of its characters’ desires and hang-ups without giving either too much credit.
Though the situation Iris and Isaac find themselves in is certainly extreme, its stakes and characters are true enough that Oh, Hi! never becomes slight or silly. Brooks and Gordon have set out to lightly send up modern dating, but they deliver something far thornier, far more melancholy than the audience may expect.
