Chain of fools
2025 has been the year of tonal whiplash, and I’m not even talking about the news cycle. Movies keep shapeshifting mid-act and even mid-scene: we have new works from known genre contortionists like PT Anderson and Bong Joon Ho, some pranks from provocateurs like Ari Aster, and a handful of unpredictable indies, too. Sometimes the rapid changes in mood and genre feel electric: Borderline flips from home-invasion panic to goofball farce and somehow lands on its feet. Other swings like Opus and Death of a Unicorn trip over their shoelaces. The gold standard of the year so far in terms of shifting tonal subversion and transformation is Sorry, Baby, which shifts between dry, quirky comedy and gutting character study and back again with balletic grace.
Oh, Hi! (a truly terrible title, especially with the punctuation) is the latest 2025 confection of what-the-fuckery: a dark rom-com that swaps storytelling modes every twenty minutes or so and is engineered to be one of the most divisive films of the year. I like it, though. It’s bold and funny. Its refusal to decide just how serious to play its scenario is audacious, even bracing.
I went in mostly blind besides catching wind of the mixed Sundance chatter, which promised something left of center. If you’re curious, that’s how I’d suggest approaching it, too. This isn’t earth-shattering cinema, but if you have a taste for dramedies with a mean streak, avoid the trailer and press play once it hits streaming services. Surprise is the most important ingredient in its recipe. Fair warning: I’ll talk through the end-of-the-first-act turn for the rest of this review.
Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) head out for a romantic weekend road trip that is straight out of a fantasy to start. But it goes south. Following an impromptu bondage session, while Isaac is literally chained to the bed, he casually replies to her bedroom chatter by mentioning he’s not “looking for a relationship.” This is several chapters behind where Iris believed they were in their storybook romance. In a fit of frustration, she refuses to unchain him and enters a mild panic attack, leaving him locked up overnight. The next morning, she decides that he will change is mind if he spends some unfiltered time with her; i.e. still chained up against his will. The day becomes a marathon of negotiation and cruel parody of a nurse fantasy, with Iris feeding him breakfast in bed and helping him use the bedpan as he tries to convince her she’s gone utterly insane without actually angering her in fear she’ll do something even crazier. Iris enlists her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Max’s boyfriend Kenny (John Reynolds) for support as they slowly realize there is no easy way out of the situation Iris has created, which is now in felony territory.
Your mileage here will depend entirely on your tolerance for characters behaving like insane gremlins. I never liked even one of them, and that’s by design. The film puts everyone’s worst impulses on display, which works as both punchline and character development. The interactions pinball from cringe to madcap to surprisingly sweet. When the film works, it’s because the script hits just the right balance of loony-crossed-with-introspection. Other times, the story stumbles, its outrageous situation that stands up to no scrutiny whatsoever revealing itself as an unthreadable needle. But I appreciated the film’s why-the-hell-not spirit anyways.
Sophie Brooks, directing her second feature after the little-seen The Boy Downstairs from 2017, acquits herself well enough as the steward of the shenanigans. She keeps the story moving ever forward, with all the tone shifts and surprises, including some feints at magical realism in the final act. I won’t call the script a narrative marvel: Oh, Hi! is more scenario than story, a what-if-well-then structure rather than anything resembling an arc. Inevitably it sags from time to time as the scenario awkwardly stumbles to its next goofy mood. But Brooks keeps tossing ideas out, Some hit, more than a few whiff. And, luckily, the pace rarely stalls for long.
The film’s casting is sensational. Gordon is terrific as Iris: she’s a big pile of neuroses pinging between warm intimacy and bug-eyed delusion. The miracle of the performance is that she always retains a sympathetic presence without sanding down the character’s outrageous behavior and motivation. It definitely has some theater kid energy to it, but it’s a well-calibrated, very funny performance that keeps the movie from tipping into cartoon. Lerman, former teen heartthrob, plays Isaac as an aggrieved straight man with just enough smug, slightly vapid delivery that you’re never fully on his side, even when he’s chained up. Viswanathan, who has been showing up in a lot of movies the past few years and seems poised for a breakout in the near future, gives Max a warmth that hilariously curdles into complicity, while Reynolds is great as a deadpan boyfriend out of his element. David Cross also shows up for a few scenes as a grumpy neighbor, though I found his energy a little aggressive.
Many of the gags are quite good: The best comes from a panicked breakfast cooking session by Iris that results in the most horrifying food-prep sequence this side of Henry’s Kitchen. But I do wish the film was a bit more of a laugh machine. Brooks’s script sometimes loses steam, stalling out at “funny-ish,” like she couldn’t find exactly the right joke or beat to keep the momentum going. Conversations collapse into airy nonsense because the characters can’t do the sensible thing the movie’s premise forbids them to do. But Brooks and co-writer Gordon (who workshopped the story with Brooks early in the pandemic) push enough little twists and surprises that it never fully deflates. I even like the ending: At the midpoint I couldn’t have told you what a “right” ending looked like for a premise this wonky. But the film’s final stretch opts for a mix of twisted romanticism and real-world consequence that cleverly and satisfyingly closes the story.
And though I had fun, I would never suggest that Oh, Hi! is a particularly deep satire. It has a pretty shallow take of relationships that verges into shticky men-Mars-women-Venus material. It’s less interested in piercing deep than it is simply escalating the “trapped” feeling of a stalled relationship to its logical endpoint. The provocative escalation itself is all the commentary we get. That’s fine by me, though; I’d rather laugh than get lectured. And, frankly, that’s the way that satire sometimes works: just pointing out the obvious thing with a goofy lark of a story.
Oh, Hi! is ultimately a fun little curveball: strange, surprisingly dark, funny enough, and streaked with more than enough kooky plot ideas for a feature-length script. It’s not the best movie of the year, but it’s the kind of movie I’m always chuffed to see. The whole movie ecosystem benefits from weird and wired indies willing to alienate us a bit in the interest of doing their own damn things. If you can meet Oh, Hi! on its chaotic wavelength and forgive its awful title and poster, you’ll find something brash and fun.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.