Brace yourselves, I’m going to “kink shame.” Though it might feel good in the moment, tying your commitment-phobic boyfriend to the bed is not appropriate sexual behavior.
Such is the lesson of Oh, Hi!, an off-kilter romantic comedy that may well be the most outrageously entertaining movie of the summer. A story of desire, frustration, and clashing expectations, the film presents the battle between the sexes as a slapdash, “bondage”-inflected folie à deux. Sound ridiculous? I can’t say otherwise. But it is also a work of exceptional creativity and charm.
Oh, Hi! stars Molly Gordon as Iris, a 20-something New Yorker caught up in the bliss of early romance. Iris’s partner, the dapper Isaac (Logan Lerman), is the kind of fellow who delivers foot rubs before whipping up a batch of perfectly grilled scallops. Sure, the guy looks like what my generation would call a “player,” but that can’t possibly be what’s going on here. No mere situationship could make a man smile so shyly, gaze so deeply, or make love so fervently — at least not as far as the already smitten Iris has allowed herself to believe.
The action takes place at a remote cabin by a lake, a location plainly meant to evoke the setting of Misery (1990), the movie’s spiritual if not tonal cousin. Here, as in Rob Reiner’s film, isolation leads not only to mischief but to a sense that the normal rules of behavior have been set aside. When, angered during some light “restraint play,” Iris leaves her beau tied up, the viewer is surprised but not stunned. Such a move would never work in a Park Slope room share. A dozen miles from nowhere, however, it makes a perverse kind of sense.
The couple’s quarrel is as old as the sexual revolution itself. Iris, having entered into an intimate relationship with a man, wants a modicum of respect in the form of romantic exclusivity. Isaac, having bagged a hot chick, wants to bag others. It is to writer-director Sophie Brooks’s great credit that the picture takes Iris’s side completely, never mind the sexual-equality dogmas of Women’s Lib. Though Iris is desperate, manic, and increasingly unhinged, Isaac is in the wrong. “You made me like you,” Iris asserts of the young man’s romantic manipulations. Only a viewer blinded by ideology could fail to nod along.
This is not to say that our heroine is not a self-sabotaging dupe. Without question, she is. Indeed, were Oh, Hi! even slightly less frank in its portrayal of fornication, I might show the film to my daughter, who, like all teenage girls, deserves to know the truth about the contemporary sexual economy. Iris has perhaps five more years of peak beauty and fertility, a span during which Isaac could conceivably bed dozens of women. To sleep with him without first demanding commitment is about the stupidest move that Iris can make. Why buy the cow if you can — well, ask your grandmother how the rest of it goes.
Another way to put all of this is that Oh, Hi! speaks eloquently to issues that I care about. For other audiences, the film’s lightness of touch will have to do. Given its plotting, Brooks’s movie could easily have made Iris into a harridan and Isaac into a sociopathic rogue. That neither occurs says much about the poise and humor with which the young filmmaker handles her idea.
Much of the picture’s work was finished when its director cast it correctly. A veteran of the Amazon alternate-history series Hunters, Lerman manages to play caddishness without sliding into unlikability. No mean feat. Gordon, meanwhile, is at least as lovely and watchable here as she is in The Bear, where she plays Carmy’s sometime girlfriend, Claire. For the film’s first half-hour, the duo ropes us in with the ease of their romantic chemistry, carrying the plot forward with almost no assistance from other actors. By the time the straps go on, we’re already cheering for the relationship. Perhaps trouble lies ahead, but surely these kids are smart enough to realize what they have in each other.
I will not reveal whether they are and do. Suffice it to say that Iris’s gambit is the kind of move that can focus a man’s attention, especially after the first 12 hours or so of confinement. Though the movie eventually approaches absurdity, especially after two of Iris’s friends drop by, its emotional stakes are never less than compelling. Not for the first time in the last few months, I found myself cheering the slow but steady return of romantic comedies to the multiplex. Put together well, they offer a moviegoing experience that has, for at least a decade, been sorely missed.
Yet Oh, Hi! would be laudable regardless of its timing. Like Whiplash (2014) and Baby Driver (2017), two other propulsive one-offs that have bucked the sequel trend in recent(ish) years, Brooks’s film bursts onto the screen fully formed, utterly self-confident, and with a good-hearted wink. I would have happily strapped myself down for another hour of it, no safe word required.
Graham Hillard is an editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.