For a film about love and science, there’s very little chemistry.
The Claire Scanlon-directed adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s novel of the same name, The Love Hypothesis, released on Prime Video on Sept. 23.
The film follows Olive Smith, a PhD candidate at Stanford who starts a fake relationship with Dr. Adam Carlson to convince her friend Ahn that she no longer has a crush on their classmate.
Also known as “Dr. Evil”, fake dating also works in Dr. Carlson’s favour because he needs to prove that he’s not leaving Stanford so he can receive essential research funding.
The fake relationship between Smith, played by Lili Reinhart, and Dr. Carlson, played by Tom Bateman, lasts a month. In that time, they convince everyone around them that they’re madly in love. However,
Scanlon has all the ingredients to direct a successful rom-com: an iconic trope, a beautiful lead actress, and a pre-established fanbase who will be loyal no matter what. But in practice, these elements don’t quite mix.
Bateman’s performance as the charming leading man was stiff and uncomfortable to watch. Dr. Carlson is supposed to be uptight and intimidating, but Bateman’s stays the same throughout the film, even when the act was over and the two became an actual couple.
Although the the audience want to root for him, his scenes felt like they were dragging on for much too long.
There were a few moments where Bateman was convincing as a love interest, but Reinhart carried the couple in terms of romantic chemistry. However, despite being a rom-com, there weren’t a lot of laugh-worthy interactions between the two of them.
When Olive makes up an embarrassing story about how the pair of them met, it is clearly meant to be funny, but it falls flat. Dr. Carlson spends most of the scene staring down at her, which could be seen as romantic, but it came off as awkward.
Olive’s close friends did a lot of heavy lifting in the comedy department. When they first meet Dr. Carlson as Olive’s boyfriend, they absolutely steal the scene.
There were changes to the plot to make it more movie-friendly, and Olive’s friend Malcolm took the most hits. Now lazy and uninspired, he’s forced to drop out of grad school after being removed from Dr. Carlson’s research team. He never finds out about Olive and Adam’s fake relationship, and his own romantic subplot with Dr. Holden Rodrigues is removed entirely.
These unnecessary adaptation changes reduce Malcolm to nothing more than a funny side character. But actor Jaboukie Young-White was phenomenal in his role and did not need to be made the butt of the joke to be funny.
The side characters were the most entertaining part of this movie, so an additional love interest couldn’t have hurt.
The villain, Tom Benton, demands sexual favours from Olive in exchange for a spot on his research team at Harvard. When this is revealed, the response is anti-climactic. They allude to his career being harmed, but we don’t see that punishment carried out, making his ending too ambiguous to be cathartic in any way.
In the end, Olive and Adam get their happy ending. They’re both working at Stanford with no mention of Benton and his offences.
The movie could have been an easy success, but as a standalone romantic comedy, The Love Hypothesis fails to hold its own. The romantic leads aren’t convincing as a couple, and the changes made for the screen only took away from the story.
Tags
movie, Review, romance, romantic comedy, romcom
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