Molly Gordon may be best known to Chicagoans as Claire Dunlap, Carmy Berzatto's on-again, off-again love interest in FX's smash hit series The Bear. She also co-wrote and co-directed 2023's Theater Camp, a mostly okay mockumentary about the phenomenon of summer theater camps and the kind of people who attend and staff them; she played dedicated alumn and staffer Rebecca-Diane. Now, she again pulls double duty behind and in front of the camera for Oh,Hi!, directed by Sophie Brooks (who shares writer credit with Gordon).
Here, she is Iris, a Gen-Z everygirl in a new and promising relationship with Isaac (Logan Lerman); the two are off to their first weekend away together, and everything starts off pretty OK. The cabin is cozy, the surrounding forest and lake are lovely, and these two lovebirds are going to make the most of being alone together and being each other's best distraction. There's an easy chemistry between them, and they settle in to a quaint weekend with homemade dinners and fresh air and a slower pace; spending this early section getting to know both of them a bit better helps carry us through what's to come.
After discovering some...toys...in the cabin's closet, the couple decides to get a bit adventurous in the bedroom. Soon, Iris is tying Isaac to the bed posts and they're both fully enjoying the results. It's the post-coital conversation where things take a turn, both for the couple and for the film.
In a moment of vulnerability that anyone who's ever been in a new relationship can appreciate, Iris casually mentions how happy she is that their first trip as a couple is going so well. Cue the predictable bristle from her cis-hetero white male partner, a manchild who's spooked at the very whiff of anything approaching even the suggestion of commitment. Still tied to the bed, he recoils at the use of the word couple, and before long, these crazy kids are on very different pages about what they're doing together and why.
Watching Iris process this news is, to put it bluntly, painful. She reacts in a way so broken and from a place of such insecurity I couldn't decide if I wanted to reach through the screen to hug her or slap her. Spend time with me and you'll like me, she's basically saying. Yikes. This is not going to go well for her, and the rest of the film is essentially watching it all unravel before her, mainly because this whole time, she's refused to untie Isaac. She's gone from possible new paramour to kidnapper all in the span of a weekend afternoon, and things are not looking good for her.
As Iris' situation unravels, so does the film. Geraldine Viswanathan and John Reynolds show up as Iris' friends Max and Kenny, who become accomplices in this farce, and David Cross is featured as paranoid neighbor Steve. The film is thus quite interior, with just this small ensemble to move us through the silliness. Gordon maintains a weird sense of seriousness throughout, as if everything that's going on around her is in some way perfectly normal and figure-out-able and who can really blame her, right? It's weird and off-putting, making it hard to care about any consequences she will or won't face.
There is apparently a crisis of dating in Gen Z and beyond, a group of young and soon-to-be adults who have been raised on screens and sequestered from the rest of the world for a not insignificant portion of their lives. They aren't meeting in person, no one knows how to engage with anyone else, interpersonal skills have bottomed out. Oh, Hi! appears to be a cinematic representation of all that, as these deeply ill-equipped people spend the film's running time fumbling through what should've been a two-minute conversation.
Isaac: "Couple? I don't know if I'm ready for all that."
Iris: "Oh. Oh, wow. I wasn't expecting that. Sorry to hear it. I'll call an uber to get me back to the city, have a nice life."
And, scene.
Oh, Hi! is now playing in select theaters.
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