Everyone loves a good love story. It's practically a cinematic institution; screwball to chick flick to heavy sexual tension, the romantic genre chock full of these beautiful young adults falling and flailing in and out of the other's embrace. It makes sense. It's something we've all had, or at the very least something we all want to have, in our lives, and yet rare is the film that pushes past delirium for the mania behind it—that conceptualizes love and the jagged emotions it can get lost in. OH, HI! is of that complicated genre twitch: a love story that’s not a romance, not really. Really it's more of a messy excision in the throes of a bigger mess, comically excavating the anxieties of modern dating culture and bracing with some unusual twists on its formulas.

Iris (Molly Gordon) and Issac (Logan Lerman) are enjoying a fairytale weekend getaway in High Falls, New York, picking through strawberries and preserves. It's a picturesque image that the film opens in—brisk and dizzying and dappled by their mutual affection—but it's not long before the two realize they've got vastly different ideas of their relationship. One needs more than the other is ready to give as kink turns criminal, and this story slides away from Gerry Marshall to Misery with a pinch of The Love Witch to it, real fast. Fun till it's not and not till it's fun again.

Love is a strange and terrible thing, and Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman are out here to yank its rose petals for briar patches and thorns. Gordon especially is working on a level previous supporting roles didn't let her show off. Always the best part of whatever she's in, here she's excitable and on the tip of turning to horror but not there yet, where Lerman’s Issac bristles with comedy chops the actor's hinted at but never explored so earnestly. Rounding out the cast are a reliable Geraldine Viswanthan and a remarkably stellar John Reynolds, playing Iris’s friends, relatively composed in contrast to dysfunction. They handle this very dicey premise with a light realism that makes it more nuanced than it might've been, though not as much as it should've. 

The quality of OH, HI! is partly great in the lengths to which Sophie Brooks takes her crazy to—how far Iris will descend, how much Issac can maneuver—but then partly strained in how the comedy goes spicier and sour within a plot stuck in broader realities of consent and intimacy that I don't think it fully thought through. It lands itself in the tough job of keeping its leads on equal footing of blame and also ethically likable in a situation that doesn't necessarily suit it.

Brooks’s script is playful, and I appreciate much of its abject lunacy, but too often the darkness of its comedy zigs when it should zag, or maybe retreat back to the drawing board. It could've gone sillier and been better, or more sinister and been far more exacting. All together it's too lost. Enchanting, sometimes fun, yet fundamentally lost in the sauce of its could've beens.

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