It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl. Girl and boy fall for each other. Boy takes girl on a romantic weekend away. Girl swoons over how breezy their first trip as a couple is. Boy hears the word “couple” and essentially leaves a boy-shaped hole in the wall, heading for the hills. While the tale may be old as time, the telling isn’t. Sophie Brooks’ quasi-romcom Oh, Hi! explores the emotional upheaval of just such a revelation in the most outlandish way possible.

When Isaac (Logan Lerman) and Iris (Molly Gordon, who also scores a story credit) go on a weekend trip, they discover a pair of kinky handcuffs in the rental property’s bedroom and decide to give them a whirl. But when Iris drops that “c” word, Isaac doesn’t so much pump the brakes as slam to a screeching halt. With that perfect deer-in-headlights stare so many women are familiar with, he explains, “I’m not really looking for a relationship…”

From Iris’s point of view, they’ve dated for four months. Of course they’re a couple. “Why would you eat me out in broad daylight?!” she cries, “That’s boyfriend shit!” But when Isaac refuses to see things her way, Iris realizes that maybe what he needs is to stay exactly there and think things over — after all, she hasn’t unlocked the cuffs yet.

That’s where Oh, Hi! takes a sharp turn away from reality toward absurdity. Her plan? Leave Isaac locked up for 12 hours. In that time, she’ll show him what he’ll miss out on if he ends things. Once he gets to know her full self, he’ll realize what a mistake it would be to leave her! Obviously!

Alas, things don’t go according to plan.

Immediately, I wonder if the happily coupled—or just long-time coupled—will be dismissive of the absurdity of Brooks’ and Gordon’s script. As Iris, Gordon isn’t afraid to embarrass herself fully and completely. She will do a literal song and dance for this man if it means she wasn’t crazy, stupid, or foolish to fall for him. She will, as Isaac points out in desperation, commit a felony for love. Isn’t that objectively unhinged?

But for Gen Z and anyone else recently in the dating trenches? The film’s messy, madcap energy perfectly highlights what it can feel like to prostrate yourself not even for love, but for the hope of it. The apps use and abuse us. So when there’s a spark, a glimmer, a hint of something that feels real? Oh, Hi! gets at the pain of having that hope snuffed out unexpectedly.

Whether you’ve been the one feeling chained to the proverbial bed or the one doing enough complicated mental gymnastics to rival Simone Biles, Gordon and Brooks absolutely nail that pain. It’s the film’s greatest strength.

Its weakness, however, is one that’s becoming all too prevalent in modern scriptwriting. Why show, when you can tell? Why let actions speak, when characters can simply monologue? As soon as the film moves beyond illustrating the situation’s pain to attempt to dig deeper, the characters who’d felt so real suddenly become alien. Iris’s friend Kenny (John Reynolds) is even called out as the son of a therapist to explain why he suddenly starts delivering such explicit insights. Either the filmmakers don’t trust themselves or they don’t trust the audience. They then attempt to correct for an error that was never there.

It’s a shame because the entire cast commands attention with the power of their charm. Gordon understands Iris well enough to ride the line between crazy and misguided, while Lerman brings unbelievable humanity to a character who could be so easy to hate. Geraldine Viswanathan and Reynolds as Iris’s best friend and her boyfriend, respectively, lend their charisma and comedic timing to help ground Iris in the midst of her insanity. Without them, it seems unlikely that Gordon alone would be able to make Iris feel truly human.

Ultimately, Oh, Hi! might be almost as messy as the relationships it depicts. Still, it understands something about modern romance even Al Brooks didn’t. It’s not interested in right or wrong. There’s no neatly slotting anyone into the villain’s role. Instead, it aims to echo how completely terrified and frantic you can feel on either side of this sloppy romantic equation. It tells us we’re not alone when we hurt someone we never meant to hurt or when something we’d thought was great starts slipping through our fingers. That understanding, and the humor with which it delivers it, is what makes ignoring Oh, Hi’s faults so easy.

Oh, Hi! snaps the cuffs on theatres starting July 25.

Oh, Hi! Trailer: