Love is what everyone seeks; conversation is what almost no one dares. That tension animates Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi!, a sly, single-location story that keeps unfurling surprises as it goes, always grounded in a sincere probe into the lonely mechanics of modern romance. It toys with melodrama without sliding into hysteria, in part because its compass points squarely at a clear thesis: the ways commitment anxiety corrodes intimacy and turns desire into dread. In spirit, it’s in dialogue with a run of recent titles—Materialists, Splitsville, Together—that reshape commitment-phobia into existential panic, but Brooks steers the film toward something more intimate: the ache of wanting someone who isn’t available, and the bittersweet fidelity to a love that’s real but not sustainable. The result lands as somber and entertaining all at once, a tonal cocktail that tastes familiar but goes down with a sting. [1][2][3]
Brooks toggles among genre registers as the story deepens, drawing viewers in with a prologue that could’ve been plucked from a rural slasher. Iris (Molly Gordon) sits in a cozy rental, terrified and glassy-eyed, when her friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) arrives and asks what’s wrong. There are sounds elsewhere in the house; danger feels imminent, but its source is ambiguous. Then, a brisk rewind: thirty-three hours earlier, Iris and her new partner Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on the road, singing Dolly Parton and bathing in the glow of a first trip together. The cabin, the kitchen, the lake—they’re all instruments of early-couple bliss, places to cook, swim, and flirt their way toward the illusion of forever. The shift from that airy freedom to the conflict that follows—kinky, messy, and calamitous—exposes how quickly a weekend can turn from possibility to predicament. [1][4][3]
What detonates the romance is small in act but seismic in implication. Iris and Isaac discover a stash of BDSM gear behind a locked closet and decide to experiment; Isaac is cuffed to the bed, willing and curious. Afterward, Iris casually, joyfully labels their getaway as “our first trip as a couple.” The mood curdles. Isaac, still bound, insists she’s mistaken—he’s not looking for a relationship—and then admits he’s been seeing other women. It’s the kind of disclosure best delivered with tact and timing, neither of which he has. Iris leaves him tied up, wounded and furious, and declares a plan: she’ll spend the next twelve hours persuading him he does want to be with her after all. It’s an absurd gambit that only escalates his fear and her fixation, and yet it’s also a precise device for the questions Brooks and co-story creator Gordon want to pose: Can love be accelerated? Can relational fluidity be both compassionate and corrosive? What happens to intimacy when instability is the norm? [1][5][6]
Brooks resists the obvious horror route. The cuffs aren’t a punchline; they’re a pressure cooker. Immobilized, Isaac can’t bolt or stonewall. He has to listen. Their enforced proximity clears space for directness that most couples dodge. The talk isn’t didactic; it’s messy, searching, and painfully recognizable. How often do partners default to shorthand instead of risking the awkward, naked questions? In modern life, where speed masquerades as connection, silence often stands in for generosity—until it doesn’t, and someone demands clarity by any means necessary. It shouldn’t take restraints to get answers. But here, necessity becomes a brutal kind of honesty. [1][4][7]
Visually, the movie squeezes startling resonance from one setting. Brooks and cinematographer Conor Murphy choreograph the space so that the house morphs with the couple’s emotional weather. At first, the cabin is a romance diorama—open rooms and lazy light—where bodies relax and time evaporates. After Isaac’s revelation, those same hallways and doorways turn hostile: the frames feel closer, the light harsher, the familiar suddenly uncanny. Returning to identical establishing shots is a quiet, elegant trick; it’s the same place, but the relationship has shifted, and the house—like a faithful mirror—dutifully reflects the fracture. [1][4][3]
The tone can be intense—two people stuck in an emotional centrifuge—but the performances keep the swirl humane. Lerman traps a spark of self-mockery inside Isaac’s growing panic; there’s humor in watching a commitment-phobe forced to stay put, a Promethean joke of a softboy tethered to an outcome he refuses to define. Gordon plays Iris with bristling intelligence and untidy vulnerability, extending the wisecrack edge she’s honed in Shiva Baby–adjacent roles while ventilating it with real heartbreak. She makes Iris’ determination both alarming and understandable: clinging to the version of love that felt true, even as the truth backslides out from under her. Viswanathan, reliable in sardonic mode, locks into a rhythm with Gordon that lets the friend dynamic—part cheering section, part reality check—tilt the energy without undercutting the stakes. [1][4][5]
Across their exchanges, the movie sharpens questions that often hide in euphemism. Can two people want different kinds of love and still call it the same relationship? Does freedom without clarity create closeness, or does it guarantee drift? The film’s answer is ambivalent: naming ambiguity can be generous, but living inside it can be cruel. Isaac’s avoidance isn’t just a personal flaw; it’s a posture that the era rewards—noncommittal until the very last moment, preserving options while nibbling at intimacy. Iris’ drive isn’t pure, either; it’s fueled by fear, by the crushing sense that the signs meant something and that the gulf between what was promised and what is delivered might swallow her whole. [1][4][7]
There’s a gentle, devastating exchange that crystallizes the movie’s project. When Isaac shrugs off the label of “relationship,” Iris catalogs the evidence like a litigator of the heart: the moments, the gestures, the words that implied permanence. She says what lovers say when standing at the edge of loss—“I like you and you like me; why stop?”—and the camera lingers a beat too long on her face after it’s clear he won’t step forward. The look is a silent biography: not again. In that suspended instant lives a history of dating with hope and colliding with hesitation; the uniquely modern whiplash of reading a shared script and finding out the other actor is improvising. [1][4][2]
Oh, Hi! keeps finding little detonations of humor in this purgatory. Being cuffed is funny until it isn’t; Isaac’s predicament is a gag until it forces a real conversation. The movie thrives on those shifts, letting the audience laugh at the right distance before inching them closer to discomfort. It’s not a lecture; it’s a series of rooms one walks through, each with a slightly different temperature, each asking the same unfixable question: What do people owe each other when desire diverges from intention? [1][4][5]
If the film flirts with genre pastiche at the outset—a whiff of slasher mood, a hint of erotic thriller—its center of gravity is firmly human. The cuffs are not a kink spectacle but a dramaturgical tool; what matters is what they prevent: the exit. Brooks’ cleverest stroke is pinning avoidance to the mattress and insisting that words fill the vacuum where retreat once lived. It’s a sly mirror to the digital era’s romances, in which people outsource their hard talks to ambiguity and “vibes,” and only face the ledger when cornered. [1][2][3]
Murphy’s camera keeps recontextualizing the geography so gently that the audience feels the shift before clocking it. A walk through the kitchen becomes a memory of a walk through the kitchen. A lake once gauzy with flirtation darkens into a backdrop for grief. This is a movie in which the setting isn’t simply a backdrop; it’s a participant that quietly composes a before-and-after without words. [1][4][3]
Gordon’s performance locates the needle-threading point between self-aware and unguarded. Her Iris can land a joke like a gymnast, then collapse into the ache of a person who believes she’s been tricked by hope. The character doesn’t read as a shrill archetype; she reads as someone who misread shared momentum and is trying to reroute fate through force. Lerman’s Isaac never becomes a cartoon cad; he’s self-protective, self-satisfied, and sometimes self-deluded, but Lerman gives him rue and shame, and the comedy comes from how earnestly he tries to manage optics even when immobilized. Viswanathan meets them with a deadpan gallows humor that underlines the absurdity without excusing it, and John Reynolds, as Max’s boyfriend Kenny, plays the incredulous bystander to perfection, registering the creeping realization that there’s no clean exit—morally or logistically. [1][4][5]
The movie’s moral imagination is blunt and tender at once. It doesn’t condone Iris’ choice, nor does it flatten Isaac’s irresponsibility into villainy. Instead, it treats their disaster as a lab where painful truths precipitate. The experiment keeps yielding the same result: intimacy can’t exist without shared terms, and ambiguity, if left unchallenged, metastasizes. The tethered body becomes a metaphor for the stuck heart; the ticking clock becomes the tempo of a negotiation neither side wants to lose. [1][4][7]
By the end, Oh, Hi! wears the quiet shatter that follows a breakup that maybe never had the courage to call itself one. It’s a film stuffed with laugh-out-loud beats and punctured by long, wordless gulfs where feeling does all the speaking. That’s Brooks’ trick: hold comedy and devastation in the same frame until they reveal they’re not opposites at all, but a matched pair—like desire and fear, like hope and doubt. [1][2][4]
What lingers isn’t the cleverness of the setup but the precision of the feeling. Most people know the experience: to adore someone who won’t pick up the thread, to cradle a brief, bright love that won’t make the jump to lasting. Oh, Hi! presses on that bruise, not to hurt but to name it. The film’s conversations—forced, overdue, sometimes absurd—remind us that connection isn’t found in assumptions or in the safe harbor of ambiguity. It’s built in the blunt, ungorgeous truths spoken aloud, the ones that free or break us. [1][2][5]
In that sense, Brooks’ movie isn’t a cautionary tale so much as a sounding board: it lets an audience hear the noise inside twenty-first-century intimacy and invites them to listen for the note they recognize. The cuffs come off. The questions stay. The echo is the lesson: love is easy to want and hard to define, and the cost of not defining it is paid, eventually, in full. [1][4][3]
Sources
[1] Oh, Hi! movie review & film summary (2025) https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oh-hi-film-review
[2] ‘Oh, Hi!’ Review: I’ll Make You Love Me – The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/movies/oh-hi-review.html
[3] Oh, Hi! – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_Hi!
[4] Review: The funny-tragic rom-com ‘Oh, Hi!’ starts blissful, ends toxic https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-07-24/oh-hi-review-molly-gordon-logan-lerman-geraldine-viswanathan
[5] Review: Sophie Brooks’ ‘Oh, Hi!’ – Vague Visages https://vaguevisages.com/2025/07/29/oh-hi-review-movie-film-sophie-brooks/
[6] Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman’s Twisted Romance in OH HI! https://punchdrunkcritics.com/2025/07/review-oh-hi-2/
[7] Oh, Hi! : Movie Review https://dcfilmdom.com/2025/07/oh-hi-movie-review/
[8] Oh, Hi! (2025) – IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33292655/
[9] “Inside Look” with Molly Gordon & Logan Lerman | OH, HI! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2epw9VJgfg
[10] OH, HI! | Official Trailer (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_IEVF0GQPk
