Back in the winter, the film Companion used the premise of a young “couple” taking their first trip together to a secluded house in the countryside as a springboard for a dystopian take on the battle of the sexes. Now, in a bit of synchronicity, that premise is revisited some six months later in Sophie Brooks’ Oh, Hi! Starring Molly Gordon (who shares a “story by” credit on the film with Brooks) and Logan Lerman, the film takes a similarly high-concept, if less technocratic, approach to explore knowingly retrograde sexual politics. Both films feature infantilized young men who desperately try to maintain dominance while preserving their personal freedom, as well as a doting if ultimately unhinged female (or female-presenting in the case of Companion) partners who exact a measure of revenge on the man who they believe wronged them. Companion was guilty of being a little glib in its tone, but in retrospect it’s practically a Bergman film compared to Oh, Hi! Brooks’ film is the sort of manic, flop-sweating farce where one is (presumably) meant to come to the conclusion that these two deeply-flawed characters ultimately deserve one another, but the primary takeaway ultimately ends up being to question whether anyone involved with the production has ever met a fully-functioning, adult human before.
The crux of the matter comes back to those earlier scare quotes around the word couple. Following a foreboding flash-forward, we’re properly introduced to attractive millennials Iris (Gordon) and Isaac (Lerman) as they sing along to the karaoke staple “Islands in the Stream” while they drive upstate to an Airbnb farmhouse for a romantic weekend. After only three months of dating there’s already a relaxed chemistry between the two of them, reflected in the way they allow themselves to appear unguarded while belting out the song or in how Isaac nonchalantly serves as lookout while Iris goes to the bathroom by the side of the road. There are storm clouds on the horizon though: when they stop at a roadside fruit stand Iris clocks the way the saleswoman openly flirts with Isaac, which he’s all too happy to encourage (he promptly kills whatever vibe might have existed when he accidentally drives their car into the stand, obliging him to buy hundreds of dollars worth of strawberries). Still, in a world of slouching, perma-adolescent young men, Isaac is presented as the rare adult. He dresses in a suit jacket for dinner, cooks Iris scallops and risotto for an intimate al fresco meal, and slow dances with her under the stars before they retire to the bedroom. Is it any wonder that she believes he might be “the one”?
It’s here one must address the rather insurmountable contrivance at the center of Oh, Hi! After being led to the master bedroom, Iris discovers a full set of bondage gear hanging in the closet: leather corset, handcuffs, chains, ballgag… the whole meghilla. And being the adventurous, sex-positive types — although only up to a point; after initially indicating that she’s down for absolutely anything, Iris hastily backtracks and insists “no anal” — they decide to make use of a complete stranger’s sex toys and engage in a bit of “dom play,” with Isaac agreeing to be chained to the four bed posts while Iris has her way with him. However, it’s in the afterglow of sex, while Isaac is still wearing nothing more than a bedsheet for modesty and, of more immediate concern, is still fastened to the bed by hand and leg cuffs, that he lets slip that he doesn’t consider them to be in a committed, monogamous relationship after a few months of dating; in fact, the most he’s willing to concede is that he always wears protection when he sleeps with other women. This marks the inflection point of the film, the moment when you either buy into what Brooks and co. are attempting to do or you mentally disengage entirely. Putting aside how seemingly out of character (to say nothing of ill-advised considering the circumstances) this confession from Isaac is, the real question is how Iris will respond. Might she uncuff him and insist they promptly return to the city, never to speak to him again? Or spend the rest of the weekend lobbing vitriolic recriminations at him as they combatively go at one another? She could violently lash out at him when he’s at his most vulnerable. Perhaps she might abandon him in this state, leaving him to question how (or if) he’ll ever escape (is what would essentially be a gender-reversal of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game). Nah, none of those. Iris instead decides, after a long evening spent on Google reading romance advice articles, that she’s going to convince Isaac that he really does love her by keeping him confined to the bed for the duration of the trip. She intends to charm him into submission, prattling on about every thought that pops into her head to a captive audience, occasionally pausing to help Isaac use the bathroom by aiming his manhood while he urinates into a bowl. She is quite literally trying to keep her man tied down.
It’s the sort of premise that requires a filmmaker of real nerve and vision to both get off the ground and remain in flight — Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! accentuated both the unsavory nature of this scenario as well as its more melodramatic qualities and, even still, that film remains hugely divisive — but in Brooks’ hands the entire premise sputters and flops around desperately. Gordon, who on the hit TV series The Bear functions as the calm center of an emotional hurricane, here plays Iris as a screwball heroine, all frantic scheming and streaked mascara, except it comes across as theater-kid demonstrative with every broad emotion telegraphed by the film. Gordon earns points for bravery — never less so than when Iris performs a come hither-meets-adorkable jazz dance number for a politely indifferent Isaac — but her director leaves her hanging out to dry. The film never lands on an actual perspective as to whether Iris is tragically deluded or driven to the brink by a callous lover, so the character instead simply comes across as unintentionally addled. And, unlike the aforementioned Almodóvar film, nothing here is stylistically heightened to match Gordon’s outsized performance. Everything about Oh, Hi! is visually functional bordering on drably naturalistic, taking its cues from the sparsely decorated farmhouse where the film is predominantly set. It’s as though the film Misery were inhabited entirely by sitcom characters, something that’s only further emphasized by the introduction of two of Iris’ friends Max and Kenny (Geraldine Viswanathan and John Reynolds, respectively) who show up to the farmhouse to lend a hand and make themselves willing accomplices to a kidnapping. It gets to the point where when Max mentions that her sister is a witch and that she can suggest a spell they can perform — of the straight-out-of-Salem, dancing-nude-in-the-moonlight variety — that will make Isaac forget everything that’s happened over the last 48 hours. Here, all one can do is throw their hands up in the air and say, “sure, it’s no less inane than anything else going on,”
But the central disconnect of Oh, Hi! is the directness with which the film and its characters speak to their physical desires while circumspectly dancing around equally grown-up matters like what are realistic expectations of a relationship and are these characters aligned in their feelings for one another. Isaac is undeniably stringing along Iris and, under different circumstances, his flippancy and emotional evasion would be considered rather cruel. Yet, because of Lerman’s relatively measured response to being imprisoned and as Gordon is going through the motions of a full-on mental breakdown, Isaac registers as an almost sympathetic figure. In that vein, the film squanders most of its brief runtime by ignoring the elephant in the room and refusing to allow Iris to litigate the case against Isaac so that it can instead cling to the fantasy that this has all been a silly misunderstanding. Iris seems to believe she’s one parlor game or clingy declaration of devotion (and it’s here that the “three months of it all” starts to cut both ways) away from Isaac forgiving her transgressions against him — naturally, she’s already forgiven his — and deciding he does want to commit to her. And it’s in this decision that the film either fails to recognize that it’s rendered the Iris character as pathetic, or worse, has knowingly made that choice because it mistakenly believes it’s a wellspring of comedic potential. It’s the sort of film that would have ended after 30 minutes if either of the characters had displayed even a modicum of maturity, or better still, played out over the course of a long, awkward car ride home. Instead, Oh, Hi! leaves the viewer feeling like Isaac: restless, embarrassed for all involved, and questioning why we ever liked these people in the first place.
DIRECTOR: Sophie Brooks; CAST: Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Cross, John Reynolds; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: July 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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