​​​​Tie Me Up! Don’t Tie Me Down!

“Oh, Hi!,” a relationship farce starring Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman, speaks to modern dating anxieties in a post-COVID context.

“I think you’re great, but I’m just not looking for a relationship right now.” If you’ve ever been let down by a man who said this to you, oh boy do I have the movie for you!

If I seem unusually industrious this week, it’s thanks to the California-bound flight that gave me the time to write the initial draft of this review.

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Oh, Hi!

Opens July 25 in moderate release.

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

‘Tis the season for couples heading upstate for weekend getaways. But these romantic escapes have the potential to go horribly wrong, especially for new lovers making their first trip together. That’s certainly the case in Oh, Hi!, a two-hander sketch stretched to feature length that also functions as an examination of modern dating. Behind the laughs, Sophie Brooks’s film is a brief inquiry into offline relationships, to adapt the title of an album by The 1975.

When we meet Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman), they’re driving north from the city to High Falls, a sleepy hamlet in Ulster County. It’s hard not to envy the breezy chemistry between this attractive duo. The relationship is a new one, as evidenced by their cheeky banter, and Iris especially seems like she couldn’t be more in love. Who could blame her? Isaac is confident and attentive, and he’s endearably gullible whenever Iris launches into one of her many bits. Moments after arriving at their AirBnB, he goes down on her; later in the evening, he sears scallops while Clairo’s “Sexy to Someone” plays in the background. I suspect that after these opening sequences, Isaac (and Lerman) will be sexy to many someones.

But trouble emerges in the bedroom, where it often does. Iris discovers a hidden cache of bondage gear in a locked closet, and Isaac is game to be cuffed to the bedframe. Afterwards, Iris basks in the afterglow with a palpable sense of relief. “I didn’t expect for it to feel this easy… our first trip as a couple.” A startled Isaac stammers a reply. “I, uh, I’m not really… looking for a relationship?”

This is the moment Oh, Hi! becomes Oh, No!

That wasn’t the only wire that was crossed. Iris assumed they were exclusive when she told him she wasn’t seeing anyone else; Isaac thought she knew he wasn’t looking to be tied down. But he’s still tied up, and Iris won’t let this be her mistake. She’s convinced that it’s not living if it’s not with him. (It’s more than a little ironic that a character named Iris could be so myopic.)

What follows is not revenge but an attempt to fix him. After a sleepless night spent consulting the internet, dating podcasts, and her mom, Iris has a diagnosis: Isaac does want a relationship with her. He just doesn’t know it yet. She proposes they spend the day together as if they were in a committed relationship, and maybe he’ll change his mind by the end of it. He will remain handcuffed during this experiment.

In moments like these, Isaac is perhaps justified in calling his lover-captor crazy. But who wouldn’t be after enduring the crucible of big city dating? Writer-director Brooks, who conceived of the story with Gordon, allows us to understand her characters without letting them off the hook. Sure, they should have just talked to each other about their expectations instead of relying on implication and vibes. But courtship thrives on ambiguity. We want connection to feel effortless. So when things go awry, we retreat behind cutesy slang—situationship, fuckboy, anxious-avoidant—to avoid facing the messiness and complexity of another person’s emotions. Sincerity is scary, especially for someone like Iris, who reflexively slips to doing a bit whenever things get too real. Her fear of being alone is relatable, though she ought to give herself a try.

Oh, Hi! attempts to balance madcap comedy with an earnest discussion of dating ethics, but the results are uneven. As the film stretches its premise, it struggles to find an ending that doesn’t involve death or the criminal justice system. We get a reprieve from that tension with the entrance of Iris’s best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who shows up to the AirBnB with her himbo boyfriend Kenny (John Reynolds) and become unwitting accessories to a light kidnapping. Their presence is welcome, but before long, they too strain the plot with continued contrivances.

Brooks wrote the script for Oh, Hi! during the pandemic and the resulting film bears the traces of these origins, even though it was ultimately shot in 2024 (after an unexplained delay from an intended 2021 production start). The action is largely confined to a single location, and the small cast would have been amenable to forming a COVID pod. But the biggest tipoff is in Isaac’s choice of reading: Blindness, José Saramago’s prophetic vision of societal collapse.

That disorienting 2020 summer accelerated the timelines of many relationships. Some bonds grew stronger, others collapsed under the stress of enforced togetherness. Through its depiction of romantic miscommunication, Oh, Hi! speaks to a wider feeling of societal alienation, one that persisted even after the world reopened. The current national mood couldn’t be more bleak. Mistrust is widespread, yet our fates have never been more bound together. It feels like modernity has failed us. But I’d love it if we made it.

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Tasting Notes

Photo taken from Serious Eats.

During Iris’s day-long effort to make Isaac fall in love with her, she attempts a romantic breakfast. Except she doesn’t really know how to cook. Haphazardly mixing bread, milk, and eggs in a bowl, she makes what could charitably be described as French toast.

The morning after breakfast is a common trope, both in movies and in real life. It would be rude to kick someone out immediately after spending the night. But not everyone is a home chef. I asked my friends if anyone had ever experienced something like Iris’s bad French toast, but either no one wanted to admit that they had been on the receiving end, or my friends have been very fortunate. One guy told me about scrounging together an “embarrassing” bowl of yogurt, blueberries, and oats from a near-empty fridge. That sounds… pretty good to me? Congrats on the sex.

Another friend told me a story about the time when she, a vegan at the time, tried to cook scrambled eggs for the girl she just started seeing. (Said paramour was vegetarian.) You can imagine how poorly those eggs turned out, but they were eaten with a brave face, and now the pair are engaged.