Eat your heart out, The CW!
Amazon’s Prime Video has quietly become the go-to source for young-adult romance. From adaptations of The Summer I Turned Pretty and Off Campus, to movies like Red, White & Royal Blue and The Idea of You, the streamer has cornered the market on yearning, meet-cutes and impossibly attractive people making questionable romantic decisions.
Its latest offering is The Love Hypothesis, adapted from Ali Hazelwood’s 2021 bestseller. Lili Reinhart stars as Olive Smith, an ambitious PhD candidate who enlists Tom Bateman’s notoriously gruff professor Adam Carlsen in a fake relationship—only for the experiment to produce some very real chemistry.
Though Reinhart is a veteran of the rom-com genre who can more than carry weight of a film when she needs to, The Love Hypothesis is as cliche as it gets; full of poor dialogue, paper-thin characters, and an over-reliance on familiar tropes. The Love Hypothesis, does, admittedly, have one ace in the hole – the original novel is based on a Star Wars fanfiction, and if you know what you’re looking for there are more than a few references to Rey and Kylo Ren peppered throughout the film. But unless you’re a card-carrying member of the “Reylo” fanbase, The Love Hypothesis is a rom-com devoid of both “rom” and “com.”
Lessons in Chemistry: Directed by Claire Scanlon with a screenplay by Sarah Rothschild, The Love Hypothesis follows Olive (Reinhart), a 20-something biologist researching pancreatic cancer in the wake of her mother’s death. Through the kind of narrative contrivance that can only exist in romantic comedies, Olive reluctantly begins a fake relationship with Dr. Adam Carlsen (Bateman) in order to convince her best friend Anh (Rachel Marsh) that she’s no longer interested in their mutual crush (Nicholas Duvernay), and the customary hijinks ensue.
Lost In Space: Rothschild’s script struggles through early narrative gymnastics to set up the otherwise basic “fake relationship” premise, delivering the kind of clunky storytelling that (in more successful films in the genre) can be savled with enough chemistry between romantic leads. Ironically, though, there’s little to no chemistry to be found between Reinhart and Bateman (who are serviceable for their individual characters, but stiff and awkward as a pair), and what should be a breezy watch feels more like a charmless relic from 2016, despite being written less than 5 years ago.
The film’s supporting cast doesn’t fare much better: Jaboukie Young-White is effortful but sparsely and awkwardly used as Olive’s classmate Maclolm, with Scanlon’s direction steering both his and Marsh’s performances in a bizarre, perpetually overblown comedic direction. In terms of film’s’ stock character writing, Malcolm and Anh are the worst offenders – to a viewer with no context of this story as a fanfiction-turned-published-novel, The Love Hypothesis is achingly cliche.
The Force Is Strong With This One: Admittedly, though, if you do know what you’re looking for, there’s a perverse, guilty pleasure sort of fun to be found in attempting to dissect which of these quippy stock characters are meant to be 1-1 stand ins for specific Star Wars and hunting for “Reylo” easter eggs. Obviously, Olive is Rey and Adam is Kylo (named for original Kylo Ren actor Adam Driver), but there’s also the added layer that Bateman is married in real-life to Daisy Ridley (who played Rey) – from character names to casting to elements of the score, The Love Hypothesis has no qualms about hinting towards its unorthodox roots.
Certainly, this isn’t the first movie be based on a fanfiction with a few names changed (50 Shades of Grey and the After franchise paved the way in that regard), but where the aforementioned films attempted supplement the shallowness of the story through memorable love scenes, The Love Hypothesis (despite its R rating) struggles to muster any real sexiness.
The Bottom Line: Though Star Wars (or perhaps more specifically, Reylo) fans may enjoy picking apart The Love Hypothesis’ many thinly-veiled easter eggs, anyone simply hoping for a passable romantic comedy will leave disappointed.
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