'Oh, Hi' is a Sweet Genre-Bender About Light Bondage

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Oh, Hi is a movie defined more by what it isn’t than what it is, though I mean that as a compliment. At almost every turn it threatens to become something more traditional, more expected, something cornier. Only it never does, and so it’s consistently refreshing; an enjoyable… comedy? Drama? Thriller? High concept? In any case, it’s a breezy little movie about relationships that tends to resist our attempts at categorization, which is an achievement in its own right.

The sophomore feature from director Sophie Brooks, Oh, Hi isn’t quite a single-location movie, but it’s almost one, and more importantly, seems to be taking pains to make you forget the budgetary constraints rather than remind you of them. Single-location movies can so often turn into filmmaking exercises, highlighting all the limitations so you can better recognize all the art being done. Brooks, meanwhile, seems more interested in exploring this story than in declaring her arrival as a great auteur. Again, it’s nice. This is a movie essentially defined by its lack of pretensions.

We open with a framing device. “I did something really bad,” Molly Gordon’s Iris tells Geraldine Viswanathan’s Max through a cracked open door (Gordon, the star, also has co-story credit).

From there we flash back, to Iris’s seemingly idyllic road trip with her boyfriend, Isaac, played by Logan Lerman, whose eyebrows I find distracting. (Are they overly manicured or just naturally stranged-shaped? Either way, I find him untrustworthy). The two of them sing along to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers in the car (“Islands in the Stream”). They stop at a fruit stand and create an awkward situation with a strawberry monger. They eventually make their way to a rental house in the woods, where David Cross makes a cameo as a kooky townie. Is he rapey or just odd? The comedy is light and situational, and it works. The framing device imbues everything with an air of menace, but also gives the easy humor space to work. You don’t have to ask where they’re going with this; we already know that it’s the prologue to “something bad.”

Even without the framing device, you’d probably sense that these two are getting along just a little too well, the way characters always seem to do just before something bad happens, like the first act of an alien invasion movie, or a revenge thriller.

What will the bad thing be? Will someone die? Is this true crime or a light caper? It’s a nice trick to get us more invested in Iris and Isaac’s light banter. Of course, the reveal has to come eventually, and when it does, Brooks manages to find a delicate balance between believability, humor, high concept, and genuine menace. Sorry to be coy, it just feels wrong to spoil the film’s central conceit. I know they sort of spoil it in the trailer, but I went in knowing nothing and that seems like the best way to enjoy Oh, Hi. An email blast told me that “Logan Lerman is bringing back the ‘Nostalgia Hunk,’” one of those nonsensical attempts at memeification marketing that suggests that one quite knew how to sell this. That actually turns out to be a good thing. Sales usually relies on comparing the product to something you already know, whereas great entertainment usually involves making something feel new.

When the “something bad” that Iris did is eventually revealed, the source of tension shifts—from “what did Iris do” to “just how crazy is Iris, actually?” The bigger question it explores is, essentially the age-old relationship question: who is worse, the partner who goes insane or the partner who drove them crazy?