Posted on February 9th, 2026.

In the annals of cinematic romance, we’ve seen grand gestures involving boomboxes, airport chases, and rain-soaked confessions. Sophie Brooks’, director of, "Oh, Hi!", introduces a new, albeit legally questionable, metric for devotion: the literal hostage situation.

For readers who haven’t yet encountered this particular brand of romantic escalation, here’s the setup:

Iris and Isaac are a newly formed couple on a weekend getaway that looks, at first, like a Pinterest-approved love story. There’s intimacy. There’s chemistry. There’s sex. There’s even a playful moment involving handcuffs, introduced consensually and flirtatiously as a prop of trust.

The rupture comes afterward. When Iris attempts to define the relationship—asking the forbidden modern dating question, “What are we?”, Isaac hesitates. He doesn’t break up with her. He doesn’t commit. 

He simply stalls. And in that suspended moment, Iris makes a choice that transforms metaphor into misdemeanor: she keeps the key.

Isaac wakes up still cuffed to the bed.

What was foreplay becomes imprisonment.

What was ambiguity becomes a crime scene.

While the film plays as a neon-soaked, darkly comedic romp, beneath the surface lies a textbook case study of Attachment Theory pushed to its most unhinged extreme. So let’s step into the therapist’s office and unpack the delulu (delusional) and the avoidant in our favorite emotionally unsafe quartet.

Iris: The Anxious-Preoccupied “Architect”

Iris isn’t just a woman scorned; she’s a woman who has built a cathedral of expectations on a foundation of sand. Clinically speaking, Iris exhibits an Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment Style, one defined by hyper-vigilance, fear of abandonment, and a deep belief that love must be secured before it disappears.

The Internal Working Model

Iris experiences herself as worthy only if she is chosen. When Isaac hesitates around labels, it doesn’t merely hurt; it destabilizes her identity. His ambiguity doesn’t read as uncertainty; it reads as erasure.

The Coercive Shift

The handcuffs are not a twist; they’re a metaphor with a Home Depot receipt. Iris’s anxiety flips into full hyper-activation: If I can just keep him here, physically present, literally attached, I can force the clarity I’m being denied. The crime isn’t impulsive; it’s logical within her attachment logic.

Performance as Defense

Throughout the film, Iris cycles through personas: domestic goddess, manic pixie dream girl, intellectual equal. This is identity diffusion in real time, an anxious attempt to unlock Isaac’s commitment by becoming whoever she thinks he wants, while quite literally holding the key to his freedom.

Isaac: The “Soft Boy” Avoidant

Isaac is the modern dating ecosystem’s most dangerous predator precisely because he doesn’t look like one. He isn’t cruel. He isn’t overtly dishonest. He is a Dismissive-Avoidant masquerading as a romantic lead.

The Deactivation Strategy

Isaac offers 90% of a relationship, weekend trips, emotional intimacy, perfectly cooked scallops, while withholding the final 10%: commitment. This allows him to experience closeness without accountability, intimacy without obligation.

The Paradox of Intimacy

When the relationship becomes real, first emotionally, then literally, Isaac’s nervous system shuts down. His eerie calm while being held hostage isn’t shock; it’s practiced emotional detachment. He didn’t panic when the cuffs clicked shut. He checked out long before that.

Max & Kenny: Folie à Plusieurs (Madness for Four)

Perhaps the most revealing psychological element of Oh, Hi! Isn’t the crime itself, but the social ecosystem that enables it.

The Echo Chamber Effect

In a healthy environment, a friend tells you to call the police. In a folie à plusieurs, a shared delusion, friends validate the fantasy. Max, armed with her own romantic disillusionment, reframes Iris’s felony as a “profound feminist act,” converting concern into complicity.

The Ritualistic Pivot

The memory-erasing ritual marks the group’s final break from reality testing. Rather than confront the legal and emotional consequences of the present, they attempt to spiritually retcon the past.

The Verdict: A “Ball and Chain” Meta-Commentary

The film quietly asks: Is a situationship just a hostage crisis with better lighting?

By the final credits, it’s clear Iris and Isaac are mirror images of the same dysfunction. One uses proximity to feel safe. The other uses distance. Neither possesses the vulnerability required for a true “High Falls” level of love.

The “Grounding the Falls” Wellness Plan

Patient: Iris [Redacted]

Diagnosis: Severe Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment with brief reactive psychosis

Goal: Transition from Capturing Love to Cultivating Self

Phase 1: Deconstructing the Limerence Loop

Limerence is an involuntary state of romantic obsession that feels like destiny but behaves like addiction.

• Intervention: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to interrupt narrative spirals
• Goal: Recognize that Isaac wasn’t a soulmate lost; he was a projection screen for unmet needs

Phase 2: Redefining “The Sign”

The broken Oh, Hi! The sign symbolizes Iris’s pareidolia, finding meaning where none exists.

• Intervention: Narrative Therapy
• Lesson: Internal validation is the only sign that doesn’t flicker when the neon dies

Phase 3: Social Detox (The “Max & Kenny” Clause)

Healing requires replacing radical enabling with radical candor.

• Intervention: Relational boundaries
• Goal: Build a community with securely attached people who resolve conflict without zip ties

Closing Argument: When Love Becomes a Crime Scene

Oh, Hi! It isn’t really about a hostage situation.

It’s about what happens when modern dating removes all guardrails and calls the wreckage “chemistry.”

Iris didn’t wake up wanting to commit a felony. She woke up wanting clarity. Wanting to know where she stood. 

Wanting the safety that used to come from mutual intention, but now has to be extracted through late-night conversations, interpretive texting, and, apparently, industrial-strength restraints.

And Isaac didn’t lie, exactly. He just practiced the most socially acceptable form of emotional disappearance: giving enough intimacy to bond, but never enough structure to be accountable.

The genius of Oh, Hi! is that it refuses to let us pretend this is just Iris’s pathology. The handcuffs may be hers, but the conditions that made them feel necessary belong to the culture.

Real intimacy doesn’t require leverage.

Real desire doesn’t need confinement.

And real love never asks you to surrender your dignity just to stay in the room.

If Oh, Hi! leaves you unsettled, that’s the point. It isn’t asking you to laugh at Iris, it’s asking you to notice how close the rest of us already are to the edge.

And maybe, just maybe, to choose a different ending before someone reaches for the cuffs.