Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi! offers the summer’s second fresh take on the modern romantic comedy.
“Fuckboy”: A man, typically straight, who leads multiple women on without ever being honest about his intentions.
“Crazy woman”: A woman, typically straight, who resorts to insane tactics and behaviors to maintain a man’s attention.
There have been entire TV shows and films dedicated to both of these dating tropes, including everything from Fatal Attraction to FBoy Island. Writer-director Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi! handcuffs these stereotypes in a bedroom and asks which came first: the fuckboy or the crazy woman? Is it the fuckboy who causes the woman to be crazy, or the crazy woman who causes the man to be a fuckboy?
Iris (Molly Gordon) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on their first weekend trip away together, and watching them flirt, make eyes at each other, and yes, have sex, feels like you’re experiencing that new flush of love. The romantic setting is even reminiscent of Past Lives when Greta Lee meets John Magaro at that retreat. Everything is going great until Iris confesses that she didn’t think it would be this easy to feel like a couple, and Isaac tells her he never thought they were a couple (despite the trip being his idea).
But rather than Oh, Hi! take Iris’s side in all of this (which, admittedly, I wanted the film to do), it leans into her “craziness,” making you question whether it’s the situation that spurred her to make a rash decision or whether that bit of lunacy was living inside her this entire time (before she even met Isaac). The film clearly implies that Iris was misled, but doesn’t let her entirely off the hook, which is an interesting approach.
When Iris’s best friends Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Kenny (John Reynolds) show up, the absurdity kicks up a notch, including the plot device of a witch’s spell, and Reynolds’ entrance will remind Search Party audiences why that show and his performance were criminally underrated.
After Celine Song’s Materialists earlier this summer, Oh, Hi! is yet another film that gives hope to the rom-com genre, vibrating with wit, sexiness, and charm. Where the former comments on the logistical barriers of modern dating, Oh, Hi! examines the communication blocks with frustrating realism. What Jaws did for the water, this film does for dating apps.
Oh, Hi! is playing in theaters July 25.
