In “Oh, Hi,” Logan Lerman and Molly Gordon find the humor in misery

Relationships are weird. One moment it’s bliss and the next, well it might be misery.

In the new movie “Oh, Hi,” we meet this young couple, Isaac (Logan Lerman) and Iris (Molly Gordon) in a moment where their relationship goes from adorable to unhinged.

Isaac and Molly are en route to a romantic weekend trip, belting out the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers classic “Islands in the Stream” in the car. They stop at a farm stand along the way to an idyllic cottage on a storybook creek, with nothing but puppy love eyes and sweet nothings for each other.

The romance goes from innocent to steamy once they’re alone in the house and discover a pair of handcuffs – and a lot more. They decide to use them, but things take a turn while Isaac’s hands and feet are cuffed to the bed. He tells Molly, holder of the key to the cuffs, something she’s not ready to hear.

“I think you’re great,” he says. “I’m just not really looking for a relationship right now.” he says.

Iris struggles to understand and accept this, refusing to let Isaac go, using her unhinged charm, a rendition of a dance performance to Mario’s Let Me Love You she originally did in middle school, and witchcraft to try and convince Isaac that he just doesn’t know what he wants.

Logan Lerman who plays Isaac told NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe it was that singular acting challenge that drew him to the project directed by Sophie Brooks.

“My first thoughts were that it was incredibly well written alongside the question of how do you do this?,” Lerman says. “How do you execute it? How do you make it exciting when a lot of the film takes place in one location and then in a bedroom for a lot of it? And as an actor, you can’t move because I’m pretty much naked, tied up to a bed the whole time. And those questions were exciting to explore for the months that we made this movie.”

Archetypes and the perils of modern dating

The movie plays around with two main types of people you’re likely to see on any number of dating apps – the so-called “soft-boy” and the “crazy girlfriend.”

Molly Gordon explains the former as a sort of new epidemic.

“You’ve seen him on the streets, all around, hiding in plain sight. A soft boy wants all the intimacy and closeness of a relationship but doesn’t actually want to be in a relationship. And you think at first … that they want something deeper. And … they want emotional intimacy, but they [really] don’t,” Gordon says.

“They want to get you to a place where you both feel really comfortable, but then they don’t want to be responsible for your emotions because they don’t want to be in a relationship. You know, I think maybe why there’s a true epidemic of them in the world right now is that we’ve all, like, lost the ability to really communicate with each other, I think just from social media and apps and all these things,” she adds.

“There are soft girls, by the way … everyone can be this way,” she says. “But I think people are scared to be upfront about what they actually want. So then you get into these situations where you feel like you’ve been misled, but it’s just because people are scared to really have those conversations in the beginning.”

Gordon wants to make it clear that “Oh, Hi” isn’t some “takedown of gender.”

And Logan Lerman told NPR a “soft boy” isn’t born; he’s made.

“It starts with the parents,” Lerman says. “I was able to … fill those blanks in and also empathize [with] him [Isaac] a lot, and the people that I’ve dated in the past where it didn’t work out. You know sometimes something was great, [but] it’s not working out within their mind. And Isaac needs to work on himself.”

Despite playing the seemingly emotionally distant Isaac, Lerman says he actually has more in common with his co-star’s character than his own.

“I’ve been a few steps away from pulling some Iris s**t in my daily life and I say a few steps because I’ve embarrassed myself going out there like putting my heart on the line and just being so honest and straightforward,” Lerman says.

Although emotionality is not reserved for any one gender, the archetype of the “crazy girlfriend” is fraught, mainly because of how universally and unfairly it can be applied – for instance, think of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.” In most cases throughout film history it’s been nothing more than thinly-veiled misogyny.

Molly Gordon, who also produced the film, says “Oh, Hi’s” treatment of this trope is meant to be as uncomfortable as it is nuanced.

“I love that saying, ‘are women crazy or are they driven mad?’ I think when feelings are withheld and when miscommunications happen, it is maddening. And it makes you become the worst part of yourself,” Gordon says.

“It is so hard to find people that you connect with – friends, lovers, anything. And when you find that you’ll do anything to protect it. I don’t agree with her [Iris] choices but I think there have been times in my life where I’ve been like, you know, pleading for someone to have a conversation or stay. And I probably seemed like a completely [sic] crazy person. And by the way, we’re all a little bit crazy.”

Rom-com? Or Rom-horror? 

“Oh, Hi” plays around with genre as much as it plays around with character archetypes. At the outset, the film uses sweeping aerial shots of the gorgeous countryside and intimate close-ups of our characters’ blushing faces bathed in the summer sunlight to orient the audience within a romantic comedy.

But as the romance rots, and day turns to night, we see light replaced with shadow and the closeups of happy faces turn anxious and twisted as the camera draws in on a knife while characters start a black magic ceremony and contemplate violence to keep Isaac from eventually reporting his impromptu imprisonment to police. It’s also impossible to deny the callback to one of the most recognizable and unsettling adaptations of Stephen King’s work – 1990’s “Misery” starring James Caan and Kathy Bates.

You’ll have to watch the film to see whether there’s any hobbling, say the actors, though.

“One of the most compelling things about this project to me was just that it had something to add to the genre,” Logan Lerman says. “I love rom-coms personally, and I’ve seen so many of them and they feel really repetitive, which is cool. Sometimes you want something … you know. But this added something to it. And like I’ve been telling people, it’s more of a rom-com gone wrong, which is kind of exciting.”

And Molly Gordon says the line between horror and romance is a lot thinner these days than anyone is willing to admit. All it takes is one misunderstanding to go from madly in love to stark-raving mad.

“You’re in a relationship and it’s going really well. But then you get into a fight and suddenly it gets so dark. Like you get home from the movies. It’s been a great night. And then suddenly it’s like, something’s been said. Look, there’s been a misunderstanding, and … your relationship has become a horror film,” Gordon says. “We’re all just raised by different people coming together to try to connect. And it’s hard sometimes. So you want to find humor in that and make people feel seen.”