The Love Hypothesis film adaptation struggles to ignite its central romance
Amazon Prime Video's "The Love Hypothesis" is a romantic comedy adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's BookTok bestseller, starring Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith, a Stanford PhD biology student who enters a fake-dating arrangement with her professor, Dr Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman). The film represents a potential showcase for Reinhart's talents, arriving amid a wave of BookTok-to-screen adaptations with mixed critical fortunes.
Reinhart's character fake-dates her professor to convince a fellow graduate student she has no romantic interest in him, whilst he needs a girlfriend to prove his commitment to administrators to secure his research funding. Despite Reinhart delivering an admirable, expressive performance throughout, the film suffers from a formulaic approach reliant on familiar romance tropes, stock characters and what the reviewer describes as "one of the flimsiest" fake-dating plots in recent memory, weakened further by choppy editing and contrived dialogue that ultimately undermines her efforts to elevate the material.
- Strong Reinhart performance cannot salvage formulaic, weak BookTok adaptation
- Fake-dating plot underdeveloped and relies on tired romantic comedy tropes
- Joins mixed wave of BookTok-to-screen film conversions
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Originally published by The Guardian as “The Love Hypothesis review – hit BookTok romcom lacks spark on screen”.