Review of Oh, Hi!, directed by Sophie Brooks

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I ended up leaving the critic job in early 2024 for another opportunity that didn’t work out, but in the tail end of 2024 and into 2025 I’ve been really focusing on this blog and putting out content on movies that I’m genuinely excited to watch and not just watching for work/clicks/views. I do have a focus on BIPOC and international cinema, but with my newly acquired AMC A List subscription, I’ve been seeing the latest blockbusters as well.

For our friends outside of the United States, AMC is basically a local chain where for 28 USD a month, you can see up to four movies a week. I don’t go anywhere near four movies a week—it’s more like one—but lately I have been going with my sister whenever there’s something new out to watch.

This week we landed on Oh, Hi! because it was my turn to pick, and the synopsis of the movie made me feel like this was going to be a fun one. My sister agreed to watching it before even watching the trailer or reading anything, which was an interesting decision of hers, and off we went to our nearest AMC to see it.

Let’s get into the review! I know introductions can get quite long, and I don’t want to keep rambling on and on.

A young couple goes on their first vacation together—but when expectations aren’t met, things get a little crazy.

Our main characters in this movie are Iris and Isaac, who, at the beginning of the movie seem like the ideal couple. They’re going on a little trip together to upstate New York, and it’s going to be there first trip together. They even stop at a local strawberry stand on the way, but when the strawberry woman directly flirts with Isaac, it awakens a jealousy in Iris. Isaac ends up driving into the stand and they’re forced to buy all the strawberries because of what they’ve done.

They arrive at the farmhouse they’re going to be staying at and immediately have sex, with Isaac specifically pleasuring Iris. They go swimming after that and start making out in the water, prompting a weird grumpy old man who lives there to tell them to not have sex in the water. After that, they head home and have a romantic dinner together.

When it comes to have sex again that night, Isaac pulls out the bondage they found earlier in the day and asks Iris if she wants to use it. They drink a bit, he locks her to the bed, but then she asks him to switch positions. She then locks him into the handcuffs and they have an incredible session (for them), but things go awry quickly when she says she was happy how their first trip as a couple is going.

This prompts Isaac to tell her that they’re not a couple, nor does he want a relationship. Iris is distraught by this and the fact he admits that he’s been having sex with other women, then leaves him chained to the bed all night while she obsessively Googles relationship advice. After finding a random PhD’s website who is an expert on relationships, she begs him the next morning to give them a shot.

She tries to convince him to give her twelve hours to make their relationship real to him, which he refuses until she mentions she might stab him. Then he agrees to her demands, and when she goes to make him breakfast, he tries and fails to get to the key. Iris wants to make French toast, so she goes to the neighbor, who happens to be the guy from earlier, and borrows an egg from him.

The twelve hours unwind slowly for Isaac, who has to listen to Iris go on and on about her childhood and attempts to perform a dance for him. At the twelve hour mark she moves to unlock him, but when she finds out he still doesn’t really want her, she leaves him there. Then her friend Max (who we see at the beginning of the movie) rolls up to help Iris out and discovers what she’s done.

Turns out she also brought her boyfriend Kenny, and with his help they realize they can definitely go to jail, especially as Isaac is related to a Senator. They begin collaborating, and while Iris and Max want to kill Isaac, Kenny stops them. Max gets a witch recipe and ritual from her cousin, which she starts concocting with Iris.

Kenny bonds with Isaac and is the one to give Isaac the tea. Max and Iris strip naked in front of a fire and perform the ritual, hoping that this will erase his memory completely. Isaac has a dream where Iris tells him she hates him, and the next morning she wakes up and it seems the ritual worked. However, he heard everything they plotted through an open window, claimed he needed an ingredient from the car, and flees with it.

Iris gives up and accepts her fate in jail. She goes back to bed, but when she wakes up again and is served strawberry pancakes, she gets a call from the sheriff. Isaac crashed the car and is nowhere to be found. The neighbor shows up and tells her he heard a boy calling her name in the woods, down by the creek, and while Max and Kenny go to her wrecked car, Iris searches for Isaac.

She finds him injured with a broken ankle. They make their amends after having an honest conversation, with him admitting he should have been more upfront, and they apologize to each other. The movie ends with Iris about to cry as the ambulance with him in it drives away, as this probably is the last time they’ll really speak to each other again.

We then get a post credits scene of Kenny with a guitar singing to Isaac while he’s still chained in the bed.

Overall Thoughts

I will have to say upfront: going into this with the bare minimum synopsis, I had no idea where this movie was going to go direction wise, and I did not expect it to go this way. It was mildly entertaining, to say the least, but the romantic comedy elements get lost in the sauce here.

Not one person in my theater really laughed. I did let out a snort at some scenes, but I genuinely was confused as to why this was billed as a romantic comedy. The jokes don’t really land, and there aren’t a ton of them. The plot itself can be really interesting and compelling, but this movie tends to drag in the middle portion in a way that’s not productive.

It’s the twelve hour sequence where this began to lose me specifically, as it felt a little dull. I get the characterization that was needed for it, but I don’t think we grow attached to either of these characters in a way where we want to root for them. The twelve hour sequence is meant to show us more of Iris and her fears, and while I get she was deeply hurting during all of this but her actions were straight up wild.

Maybe this movie should have gone full camp, like Lisa Frankenstein, is what I’m thinking. I wanted more from this and it didn’t deliver at the end of the day. This film feels like it has a lot of lost potential, even though it can be quite good if it had been done in a different way.

Go see it though if you’re interested! You might disagree with me, an Internet stranger, and that’s okay. Taste is so incredibly subjective at the end of the day and neither of us are wrong.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.