Writer/director Sophie Brooks' Oh, Hi! opens like a horror movie, with ominous background music as a car pulls up to a secluded house late at night. "I did something bad," Iris (Molly Gordon) tells her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), when she opens the door. Even the subsequent smash cut to 33 hours earlier, as Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are cheerfully on their way to a weekend in the country, carries the threat of that impending "something bad."
It's a bit disappointing, then, that Oh, Hi! isn't a horror movie, because at least that would entail Brooks following through with one of the many narrative swerves that she introduces and backs away from. For a movie about two people going to extreme lengths to define their relationship, Oh, Hi! has a real problem with commitment, and that takes the sting out of its surprising twists. The cast, which also includes John Reynolds as Max's boyfriend, Kenny, keeps things lively, but they can only do so much to prop up the thin storytelling.
The specter of the opening flash-forward hangs over the seemingly idyllic vacation for Iris and Isaac, who've been dating for four months and appear to be perfectly matched. There are occasional hints of the darkness to come, but otherwise the first 20 minutes or so of Oh, Hi! offers a sweet and almost cloying romance.
That is, until one wrong response from Isaac changes the whole dynamic, and suddenly the BDSM equipment that Iris found in the rental house's closet serves a new, more sinister purpose. From there, Oh, Hi! turns into what could have been a biting satire about modern dating, like a rom-com version of Stephen King's Misery, but Brooks opts for cutesiness over complexity, squandering the opportunity for something truly demented.
Gordon remains charming and funny even in Iris' most unforgivable moments, but a character this unhinged needs someone to match her freak, and Lerman's Isaac is too passive and withdrawn. Part of that is because of the situation that the plot puts him in, but if the characters aren't equally cunning and devious then their conflict falls flat. Oh, Hi! is gentler than similar recent dark psychosexual comedies like Sanctuary and Piercing, but it relies on the same set-up of two people exploring potentially complementary kinks within an extreme scenario.
That underwhelming exploration gets exhausted fairly quickly, and it helps when the story circles back to the opening scene, with the arrival of Max and Kenny at around the halfway point. There's some amusing dry humor as the apparently more functional couple contemplate possible solutions to Iris' predicament, with a deadpan approach to life-or-death stakes that recalls the underrated Reynolds-starring series Search Party.
None of these comparisons does Oh, Hi! any favors, though, and what look like big swings result in surprisingly minimal consequences, both for the characters and the progression of the plot. The biggest letdown is when moments that come off as delightfully shocking are dulled into irrelevance. A late-film flashback to Iris and Isaac's third date brings back the sappiness of the initial romance, and Brooks might have been better off just making a straightforward romantic comedy.
Gordon and Lerman have appealing chemistry, Viswanathan could play the quirky best friend role in her sleep, and Reynolds offers solid support as the befuddled hanger-on. Turning the story into a pseudo-thriller doesn't make it more romantic or more provocative. Like the opening scene, it just amounts to an elaborate and self-conscious bit of superficial misdirection. ♦
Oh, Hi!
Rated R
Directed by Sophie Brooks
Starring Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan
