Oh, Hi!

Grade: C

Oh, Hi! is a fairly bad movie, to be sure – but more than any adjective you could throw at it, it’s an incomplete one. That is its worst offense. We know it’s over because it ends, but otherwise, absolutely nothing is learned or resolved. No arcs are completed. We see stuff happening, until – at an arbitrary point – we don’t anymore. I was hopeful when I saw a mid-credits scene begin, thinking it would fill in some blanks and put a button on everything – but no, it was just a quick throwaway joke from an earlier bit.

The opening scene suggests a thriller, but it doesn’t push many envelopes in that department. It’s nighttime, and Iris (Molly Gordon) is visited by her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan). Iris is frantic: “Thank you for coming, I need your help, I’m in so much trouble, I did a thing, etc…” Cut to 33 hours earlier, so says a title card, as we see Iris and her partner of four months, Isaac (Logan Lerman) road-tripping on country roads for a romantic weekend at a rented lake house. This is a sweet, sexy setup.

They discover BDSM paraphernalia in a locked closet, and Isaac lets Iris handcuff him to the bed. After the completion of their activities, Iris makes a comment about how excited she is about “our first trip as a couple.” Isaac’s response is to the effect of “Whoa, hold up. I’m not ready to be boyfriend and girlfriend. We never talked about being exclusive. In fact, you’re not the only one I’ve seen or been with these last four months.” Turns out, it wasn’t smart of him to word-vomit all of this while still shackled to the bed. She doesn’t take it well, and decides to leave him tied up for at least 12 hours – during which time, she will try to convince him to reconsider his stance on the romantic arrangement. Naturally, Isaac bounces around between politely pleading to be let go, to warning/threatening her with all the legal stuff that will happen, to sleeping to pass the time, to playing along and placating her with “good behavior” so he won’t raise any red flags and extend his sentence.

Halfway through, the screenplay seems to run out of ideas, and you can almost feel everyone trying to kill time and stretch it out. The actors bring as much as they can to their characters, such as they are. Molly Gordon, as Iris, impressed me the most. From her work in Theater Camp and You People, I’d only ever thought of her as a Tina Fey/Amy Poehler type. The wisecracking sidekick, or comic relief best friend of the romcom heroine. Finally, here, she is showing her true star power. It’s a side of her I’ve never seen, and I really enjoyed seeing it. 

The lovely and wonderful Geraldine Viswanathan (Thunderbolts*, You’re Cordially Invited, Drive-Away Dolls) is overqualified and wasted in her supporting role as Max, and her accent is extremely distracting. Granted, she is from Australia, but I don’t remember her sounding like this ever before. She sounds American, except for random words here and there. As Isaac, Logan Lerman (Bullet Train) has to navigate some inexplicable or undercooked plot turns, but he remains appealing. Comedian David Cross shows up to be an unfunny sore thumb. You almost didn’t need his character at all. 

About an hour and a half in, the movie finishes being a movie. You can’t call it an ending. It’s as if more was shot but not included, written but not shot, or just not written. It doesn’t go far enough to be a tense high-stakes thriller, and it definitely fails as a comedy, try as it might. I left Oh, Hi! feeling disappointed and empty, and given how taken I was by Molly Gordon here, that’s saying something.

Grade: C