Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) seem like a nice couple, so you know something will have to go wrong. Formally, Oh, Hi! says so directly, with a brief cold-open grabber affixed to the front of its narrative, where Iris seeks help from her friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) in some unspecified emergency. But it’s hardly necessary; recent movies like Companion and Fresh have already encouraged a hyperawareness of toxic-relationship warning signs. It’s not that Iris and Isaac radiate this toxicity, either. Sort of the opposite: Their ease together as they embark on a weekend getaway upstate – sharing the driving, joking with each other, lustily smushing their bodies together – only starts to feel slightly incongruous when they ask each other questions or make references to their limited shared history. Eventually, it becomes clear that they don’t know each other all that well. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Renting a little farmhouse for a weekend and playing at couplehood with someone who isn’t yet wholly familiar to you.
Oh, Hi! is not a horror movie, but after establishing Iris and Isaac as a likably imperfect and attractive pair – she’s maybe a little neurotic, he’s maybe a little aloof – it does have a stomach-dropping moment that plays like the rom-com version of the Psycho shower. It involves that pesky word “couple,” which Iris drops with sweetly dorky pride and which Isaac, who for all of his slightly blank affect turns out to have a pretty terrible poker face, blanches. This is a strategic mistake, especially because he’s handcuffed to the rental-house bed at the time, having just finished some playfully barely-kinky sex. Iris – who has previously admitted to having a violent impulse with a previous ex, unacted upon – is devastated by his assessment of their apparently not-quite-relationship, and leaves him locked up for spite. At least, at first it’s for spite. After a sleepless period of fretting and internet rabbit-holing, she decides it’s for some kind of therapy, and though she claims to no longer be furious, she also refuses to let him go just yet.
Actually maybe it’s unfair to say that Oh, Hi! is not a horror movie; anyone who identifies with either Iris or Isaac may receive it as such – and, moreover, the movie is most exciting when it feels like it might pivot into Misery territory at any moment. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that writer-director Sophie Brooks, who made a charmingly low-key indie called The Boy Downstairs a few years back, keeps things firmly in the realm of dark comedy, anchored by a tour de force of spiraling from Gordon (who co-conceived the story with Brooks). Unlike some smugly quasi-satirical horror takes on dating fears and frustrations, Oh, Hi! isn’t looking to score righteous points via Iris, whose cathartic rage is regularly overcome with desperation and bad ideas. Gordon’s fearlessness in laying those feelings bare is somehow both very funny and weirdly touching. As maddened as Iris is by her sort-of beau’s behavior, she also seems to find it liberating. Then again, maybe that’s just the stark contrast with her lack of literal handcuffs.
Emotionally speaking, Lerman doesn’t quite hold up his end of the bargain. It’s hard to tell if this has to do with his diffident performance, or if it’s just because the movie is understandably more rooted in empathy for Iris; Isaac explains himself, sometimes forcefully, but it’s Iris’s head we’re invited to dive into, with an soaking intensity Isaac doesn’t seem to warrant. He frequently comes across as dim, and unlike Iris (whose neuroses are twined together with what’s funny about her), that dimness mostly just serves the plot.
That’s noticeable because of how strung-along that plot can feel in the movie’s back half. The laughs don’t disappear – Viswanathan and John Reynolds arrive to steal several scenes – but the pace starts to meander and exhaustion sets in. In a sense, the movie is a victim of its own success at evoking an early-relationship rollercoaster, stabilizing into hangout-sitcom shenanigans where most of the stakes and tension are provided by characters insisting that it’s all still there. (Regardless of the legal-repercussions talk, some bits from the second half could easily fit into a New Girl episode.) The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.
Director: Sophie Brooks Writer: Sophie Brooks Starring:: Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds Release Date: June 13, 2025 (Tribeca); July 25, 2025 (theaters)
