Polly Draper Archives | Deep Focus Review

Oh, Hi!

Brian Eggert — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:17:54 +0000

“I did a thing,” confesses Molly Gordon’s Iris, the sympathetic if somewhat unhinged protagonist of Oh, Hi!, a familiar, convoluted rom-com that escalates into bad-sitcom level absurdity. When Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman) escape to a picturesque farmhouse—singing the Dolly Parton-Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream” in the car like an old married couple—their weekend trip brings some details about their relationship status to light. The “thing” she admits to over the phone, speaking to her best friend Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), is that she has chained Isaac to the headboard and refuses to release him. It started as playful bondage and good sex, until he remarked that he didn’t consider them boyfriend-girlfriend. “I’m not really looking for a relationship,” he says, after four months of dating. And so, Iris has resolved to leave him there, hoping that he might come around after twelve hours or so. This twisted look at modern dating from writer-director Sophie Brooks is the kind of insufferable movie where, if the characters just had a quick conversation to clarify their feelings, they could have avoided everything that follows. But then, of course, there wouldn’t be a movie—meaning Oh, Hi! exists to perpetuate itself. Brooks lays […]

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Shiva Baby

Brian Eggert — Tue, 11 May 2021 01:38:37 +0000

Emma Seligman’s debut feature Shiva Baby runs a mercifully short 78 minutes. Any longer, and it may have caused a heart attack. The writer-director’s expansion of her same-named short film is riddled with anxiety. The second-hand embarrassment is palpable, causing us to squirm in our seats, gasp in horror, or broadcast more than one audible “oh no” at the screen. Cringe comedy isn’t an unpleasant enough term, given how expertly Seligman manipulates the viewer into the rattled, sweaty, palpitating frame of mind of her central character, Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott. When the film opens, Danielle finishes hooking up with her sugar daddy and leaves for a shiva, though she’s unsure who died and missed the funeral for her sex work. But even before her recent patron, Max (Danny Deferrari), arrives at the same shiva and makes an already unbearable family situation worse, the single-setting film becomes achingly tense and uncomfortably funny. Seligman’s treatment of Danielle’s sex work is honest and humanizing, placing us on the protagonist’s side in the first shot when Max almost forgets to pay, and then sends Danielle off with a lingering, inappropriately intimate hug. Whereas other films either demonize sex workers or portray them with […]

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Demolition

Brian Eggert — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:53 +0000

After his wife dies, Davis receives some advice from his father-in-law-turned-boss: “If you want to fix something, you have to take it apart and put it back together.” In Demolition, the main character takes this advice literally. Davis begins to tear down his home and destroy his belongings. Amid the wackiness, director Jean-Marc Vallée means to project something profound, this being his third Oscar-baiting film in a row after The Dallas Buyers Club and Wild—two films relying on similarly obvious metaphors to propel their dramatic turns. By breaking down the protagonist and building him back up again, in both literal and figurative ways, the film explores its subject from a measured distance, drawn only by an unsteady mix of satire and emotion. At times unpredictable and funny, Vallée’s few inspired flourishes fall short of transcending the story’s obviousness and sudden ending, despite a strong central performance by Jake Gyllenhaal. The screenplay by Bryan Sipe borrows much from American Beauty. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Davis Mitchell, a disaffected investment guru who loses his wife to one of those shocker car crashes Hollywood is so fond of lately (Adaptation and No Country for Old Men feature great examples). Afterward, Davis, who admits he’s […]

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