Let us begin, briskly, with a setup so familiar you can smell the cedar paneling: two moderately good-looking people, neither too rich nor too ruined, retreat to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of whispered flirtations, thinly veiled anxieties, and the odd foray into consensual rope play. What follows is not the cabin-in-the-woods horror, but the cabin-in-the-woods rom‑com, which, as it turns out, is its own variety of hell.

“Oh Hi” wants to be the clever clogs of genre-subverting indies. And for a while—perhaps an act and a half—it succeeds. Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman fizz through the early scenes with a chemistry that doesn’t so much sizzle as simmer, gently. Gordon, all wounded wit and controlled chaos, carries the emotional ballast, while Lerman—flinching, ironic, possibly constipated—plays commitment-phobe Isaac with a well-practiced smirk.

There’s a distinct pleasure to watching them dance their neurotic little dance: the late-millennial pas de deux of “are we or aren’t we,” “should I or shouldn’t I,” “did you really just say that?” It’s not realism. It’s performance—relationship as performance—two people cosplaying sincerity while quietly measuring the exits.

And then, like a rogue lightning bolt from a forgotten Scooby-Doo episode, the film takes a turn. A very odd, very self-conscious turn. Enter witches. Literal witches. Or, depending on your interpretive generosity, metaphorical ones wearing velvet capes. The plot careens off the realism rails and into something resembling a low-budget Lynchian detour, but with fewer dreamscapes and more screamed accusations in the snow.

Here, the film’s cleverness curdles into contrivance. What began as a chamber piece of modern romantic discomfort becomes a lopsided farce, tone-deaf in its escalation. The characters don’t grow. They react—loudly, illogically, hysterically—as if being puppeted by a screenwriter suddenly bored with his own emotional arc. Gordon still tries valiantly, anchoring moments of vulnerability with a trembling, tragicomic dignity. But she’s stranded in a script that can’t decide if it’s about trauma, kink, gender dynamics, or just really hates couples.

One wants to applaud the ambition, at least. There’s something admirable, or at least admirably insane, in a film that dares to zigzag from meet-cute to metaphysical meltdown in under 90 minutes. But tonal whiplash isn’t narrative daring. It’s mess. And the mess here—of genre, of mood, of intent—undermines the solid craft on display elsewhere. The cinematography is crisp. The performances are often affecting. But all is undone by a final third that thinks volume is the same as catharsis.

So where does that leave us? “Oh Hi” is not a bad film. It is, worse, an interesting failure. It shows its working, loudly and proudly, and that—despite the irritating histrionics—is its most human trait. Like its characters, it wants too much, too fast, too hard. And in the process, it forgets that sometimes, the quiet collapse of a weekend romance is drama enough. No witches required.

WORDS: brice.