There seems to be a trend this year of cinematic love stories in which someone holds their beloved against their will. Earlier this year, the sci-fi survival flick Companion saw Jack Quaid strapping his significant other Sophie Thatcher to a chair when she finds out she’s a killer android. We also had Samara Weaving as a pop star trying to escape Ray Nicholson’s obsessive, matrimony-seeking stalker in the tongue-in-cheek thriller Borderline. (I’m assuming Alison Brie and Dave Franco will also engage in some extreme bondage in their upcoming elevated horror show Together. Stay tuned for our review of that one next week.)
And now we have a bit of screwy suspense with Oh, Hi!, a movie where someone gets chained to a bed. But this time around, it’s a dude who finally gets his!
Star/producer Molly Gordon (The Bear, Theater Camp) is Iris, the gal who does the restraining during a weekend road trip to a countryside vacation home with her boyfriend (Logan Lerman). At least, she thinks he’s her boyfriend. After some steamy, prop-enhanced lovemaking, Iris uses the C-word — that’s couple — and the still-shackled Isaac informs her that this ain’t serious. This sends Iris into panic mode, leaving Isaac chained up so she can spend the next 12 hours convincing him how great they’d be together. This mostly involves Googling solutions, making some disgusting-looking French toast, and re-creating a childhood talent-show dance routine set to Mario’s ”Let Me Love You.”
You might go in thinking Oh, Hi! is a dark comedy in which a fed-up, unstable gal goes Misery on a man who sees her more as a side piece than the love of his life. Right from the jump, writer-director Sophie Brooks makes viewers think there’s something not right with this coupling. The first 30 minutes is all lovey-dovey and full of affection as the pair drives to their destination, adorably singing ”Islands in the Stream” together. But Brooks throws in some glitches, like Iris and Isaac having a brief but heated spat over a town name on a welcome sign. (Isaac says it’s High Falls, but Iris says it’s O’High Falls — hence the title.) It had me thinking we were actually seeing everything from Iris’ rose-colored perspective, and we’d eventually flash back to how the day really went down.
The new mockumentary hits the Belcourt and Regal locations this week
At some point, Brooks must’ve had a change of heart, deciding to give her loopy antiheroine a redemption arc. Sure, Iris displays a lot of outta-pocket behavior. (Much like her Shiva Baby co-star Rachel Sennott, Gordon doesn’t mind portraying a neurotic, narcissistic nut onscreen.) But we soon learn that she’s actually the least crazy person in her friend group.
Scared that Isaac will call the cops once he’s freed, Iris calls her bestie Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) for a solution. She and her doltish boyfriend Kevin (John Reynolds) show up at the house and willingly implicate themselves in this accidental kidnapping. They even conjure up some witchcraft in the hopes that Isaac will forget all of this. Brooks eventually knocks off the preposterousness and gets sincere, as the commitment-phobic Isaac starts getting a bit Stockholm Syndrome-y, wondering if he’s just as broken (and brokenhearted) as his captor.
As much as Oh, Hi! wants to be a less flamboyant, gender-swapped Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, it owes more to All About Steve — the stinker featuring Sandra Bullock as an annoying single gal who goes on a bizarre hero’s journey that makes even the guy she’s been stalking (a pre-A-list Bradley Cooper) bow in respect.
Oh, Hi! is a hot-ass mess of a movie, coming to a surprisingly sensible stop after 90 or so minutes of awkward, tone-shifting fuckery. But Brooks and Gordon have too much compassion for their troubled but well-meaning protagonist to dismiss her as a textbook batshit stereotype. For them, Oh, Hi! goes out to all the women who — as Big Mouth’s Hormone Monstress would say — love big and love hard. They just expect whoever they’re with to do the same.
