Writer and director Sophie Brooks started working on the script that would become “Oh, Hi!” with some self-imposed challenges in mind: Namely, that the story would be something she could execute under lockdown-type conditions, with a very limited set of characters and locations, so that she could actually pull it off on an indie budget.

It’s to the creative team’s credit that the film never feels small or constrained, because Brooks, DP Conor Murphy, production designer April Lasky, and editor Kayla Emter all pull cinematic tricks to make the story of Iris’s (Molly Gordon) and Isaac’s (Logan Lerman) getaway gone off the rails feel as big as their emotional overreactions. 

Chief among them is how Brooks and Emter structure the montages across “Oh, Hi!,” using them to pull the audience into the ways that Iris leaps to assumptions about what’s happening, both good and bad. 

In fact, the only two pickups that the “Oh, Hi!” team needed for the film after their 21-day shoot (in a house that is actually in Germantown, NY) was for the moment that Iris decides to make a restrained Isaac French Toast and for the moment late after their fight when Iris doomscrools her way into a pretty unconventional interpretation of relationship advice. 

Armed with photographic references of the location, Brooks and her team built just enough on a stage in Brooklyn to be convincing, then crafted a slow push-in on Gordon, the lights in the room slowly disappearing, to make the audience feel like they’re being sucked into a dark hole. 

“I love that sequence so much,” Brooks said. “My art department created a video of things that she’s searching and then Molly also improvised certain things and typed in things on her own, and it was such a fun way to articulate what that feeling is when you feel lost and scared and alone, and you turn to your phone, which is not where you should turn. But it’s where we all turn.” 

“Oh, Hi!” pursues a sense of bad decisions, a sort of there-but-for-the-Grace-of-Google-Search, coming from a relatably human place. Which is a very fine line to walk, both for the performers and for the filmmakers putting together the final takes in the edit. 

“The balance in perspectives and the tone were important to me from the jump of the story and the screenplay, making sure it felt balanced and not like we were saying women are crazy and men are assholes. The whole point is that it’s not that simple,” Brooks said. “So we would do versions where Molly was really, really crazy and where Logan was a little meaner, and then we’d find a medium. And then in the edit, a lot of it was going, ‘OK, I think I know what this is, but let’s play around with different levels.’ Kayla and I worked together to kind of refine their perspectives.” 

The clear sense of perspective makes the doomscroll montage and the other montages around it so effective. For instance, Brooks and her team lean in hard to show Iris’s interpretation of how charming their initial arrival at the house is. It’s covered in a montage bathed in the gorgeous greens and blues of the Upstate New York landscape, and bursting with a kind of joyful spontaneity. That feeling is very much intentional, as Brooks wanted to leave herself open to what the best, funniest, most effective beats in that sequence would be once they’d gotten on location. 

“That stuff was all improvised. So, them in the kitchen unpacking the groceries, them talking about the design of the chairs? That was all improvised, which was really fun. The same with the witchy stuff that was written into the script as improv. Certain herbs were specified, but then certain ones we just found in the garden, and we were like, ‘Let’s go with this,’” Brooks said. 

Thoroughly planning out the movements of the script and yet still leaving space to be nimble based on what presents itself in production, combined to help Brooks assemble the best version of the edit. “I’m pretty detailed, but I also think you don’t know where you’re going to shoot, right?” Brooks said. “When you’re working with your costume designer and your production designer and your DP [to] find the look of the movie and collaborate on my ideas and their ideas… It’s such a fun part of making the movie, landing on that stuff.” 

“Oh, Hi!” is now playing in theaters.