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Fans of the dearly departed Riverdale – or, moreover, admirers of all the batshit things the CW comic soap could make its bright young actors say with straining sincerity – have long rooted for Lili Reinhart. The Betty Cooper of yore was the best of that talented crop (Charles Melton and Camila Mendes among them) at rising above her subpar surroundings, her impressively expressive eyes able to sell the unsellable with complete conviction. She is the type of helplessly endearing performer suited to roles of naivety who masks surprise steeliness, as in her notable turn in 2019’s Hustlers or, better yet, romcoms, though there remains a dearth of worthy material. (A dual role in 2022’s Look Both Ways, a Netflix homage to Sliding Doors, didn’t cut it.)
At least on paper, The Love Hypothesis, a new romcom from Amazon Prime Video, should be that material. The BookTok sensation by neuroscientist turned author Ali Hazelwood presents an ideal Reinhart protagonist: extremely nerdy, in a periodic table way, yet conventionally beautiful, awkward and self-deprecating yet cutting when it counts, the type of sweet-presenting young woman who will shout “fuck” repeatedly in private. Which Reinhart’s Olive Smith, a young biology PhD student at Stanford, winsomely does in the film’s unsettlingly cold open, as a bleary-eyed Olive, blind from expired contacts, freaking out before her grad school interview and then boldly stating her cancer-solving intentions to a brusque, handsome professor in a lab bathroom.
That Olive and said professor, haltingly played as a robot-cum-dreamboat by Tom Bateman, will fall in love is of course a given; The Love Hypothesis arrives amid a wave of BookTok adaptations that largely tinker with the genre formula, with mixed results, from the hit-and-miss CoHo movies (Regretting You, Reminders of Him and, most notoriously and successfully, It Ends With Us) to the YA smash The Summer I Turned Pretty and this summer’s hit Off Campus, itself riding the cultural tidal wave that was Heated Rivalry. In that long shadow, The Love Hypothesis, directed by Claire Scanlon, a veteran of Netflix’s 2018 romcom wave (Set It Up), from a screenplay by Sarah Rothschild, comes off as artlessly, almost lazily by the numbers, a faltering chain of tropes (enemies to lovers) and stock characters (the unavailable man, the gay best friend) to a jaunty string score.
It does not help that The Love Hypothesis possesses one of the flimsiest fake-dating plots in a deluge of fake-dating plots. The setup is a bit convoluted, and perhaps necessarily rushed through: Olive, an orphan whose mother’s death inspired her apparently pioneering research into pancreatic cancer detection (this, I believe!), bonds quickly at Stanford with Anh (Rachel Marsh), a fellow grad student whose bold personality is signified by her “feminism” T-shirts. When Anh turns down a date with Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay) because she knows Olive has feelings for him, Olive scurries like a lab mouse to find a reason to convince her otherwise. Cue a sudden kiss, in between lab tests, with the first man she can find, who happens to be Dr Adam Carlsen, that handsome scientist all the students call Dr Evil … and who also needs a girlfriend to prove to administrators that he’s staying put, lest they cancel his grant funding.
Again, Reinhart can sell many imperfections – a mousy shade of brunette, a wardrobe more 2016 than 2026, a very inconsistent voiceover, clunker lines like: “My dopamine is surging!” or: “Your work on circulating tumor cells is groundbreaking!” – but a choppily edited fake-dating plot this thin proves especially challenging. Still, she is admirably game for the task, as Olive and Adam, both extremely task-oriented and possibly (though never explicitly) neurodivergent, awkwardly try to convince others of their attraction while continually hashing out the terms of their “experiment” with all the control/variable terminology you’d expect. At her best, Reinhart invokes the near-hammy but impossibly charming comedic timing of Big Fat Liar-era Amanda Bynes, particularly in a scene in which the couple must sell their relationship to Dr Tom Benson (Arty Froushan), the suave Harvard lab director of Olive’s dreams who also happens to be Adam’s best friend.
Reinhart remains the film’s ace through its many tonal stops and starts, from relatively molehill-sized conflicts to an abrupt swing toward the comically evil (perhaps a holdover from the novel’s roots as Star Wars fan fiction). That inconsistency is reflected in Bateman’s performance, which jerks between unfeeling automaton and swoonworthy romantic hero too readily; there is only so much he can do to mask his ability to play tall, dark and handsome leading man, though one unexpectedly sensitive, female gaze-y sex scene – let’s just say that a line reading I have to imagine was supposed to be “you’re incredible” lands as “you’re edible” – does a lot to boost the film’s flagging heat. Still, you don’t have to be a scientist to be left wanting for more chemistry. The Love Hypothesis demonstrates that you can have all the right ingredients for a romcom, but movie magic has never been a science.
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The Love Hypothesis is available on Amazon Prime now
English (US) ·