Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman are Bound for Romance… in More ways Than One
DIRECTED BY SOPHIE BROOKS/2025
Oh, hi! Didn’t see you there. I’m here to review the new awkward romantic comedy, Oh, Hi!, by writer/director/producer Sophie Brooks.
Awkward intro? Sorry…! But no more awkward than this movie.
Brooks is something of a newcomer to the world of studio-distributed feature films, so she wisely chose to populate this outing with a few recognizable faces (Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, and John Reynolds) and to keep it contained primarily to a large farmhouse. The farmhouse is located out in the country, away from it all. For our main characters, Iris and Isaac (Gordon and Lerman), staying in this charming rental property is part of a planned romantic getaway. Plans, though, don’t always go as planned.
The first twenty or so minutes of Oh, Hi! is one thing; the remaining seventy or so are something else. I personally much prefer the first portion, a hangout in which we get to know Iris and Isaac as they make their way to the farmhouse and proceed to frolic, flirt, and f(well, you know). If Isaac is a little to coddling for comfort, Iris raises more red flags as time goes by. Least of which is in discussing their favorite films, when there’s little evidence that she’s actually seen her “boring pick”, Casablanca, so much as seen its most famous moment. Nevertheless, they bond over how resonant it is that Rick and Ilsa will “always have Paris”.
Then Isaac spends the next hour chained to their bed. Their kinky little sex game becomes something else as Iris decides to keep him there until he retracts something upsetting that he said about their relationship. In real life, I doubt that particular bed frame nor those particular handcuffs could hold a grown man who is as determined to escape as Isaac understandably becomes. But, this is the movies…
From this point, Oh, Hi! spirals into what feels like make-it-up-as-you-go storytelling, with Iris’ friends (Viswanathan and Reynolds) showing up to help her manage the crisis of how to resolve this baaaad situation she’s gotten herself into. They’re not much help. At one point- well into it- they attempt a completely out-of-left-field solution that almost feels like Brooks is shaking up the film’s rules of reality. Then more contrivances abound. Is it funny? No.
The way Oh, Hi! concedes to extended narrative wheel-spinning in its second half reminded me of Anora, though that film had the wherewithal to come together and hit us with a powerfully ambiguous ending. This, not so much. It ain’t no Anora, and it sure ain’t no Casablanca. But hey, for those who do go ahead and check this out… we’ll always have the first twenty minutes.