The Love Hypothesis did it’s research. When you craft a romcom formula, there are basic steps that have to be followed. You can only switch a couple variables to see if your test actually succeed. A little Lili Reinhart here, a little Tom Bateman there, record the results, and present your findings. Well at this Amazon conference, I came away happy I went, but a little tired after the 1,000,000th trial on the same movie test we’ve endured since movies began. Ok, I’ll probably be back for 1,000,001.
We’re at Stanford University’s doctoral research programs. After the requisite heartbreaking intro to Olive Smith’s (Lili Reinhart) reason she’s getting her PhD, we meet her best friend and basically only family, Ahn Pham (Rachel Marsh), sweet and equally motivated. Olive and Ahn for a brief moment both liked fellow doc student Jeremy Langley (Nicholas Duvernay), but Olive’s crush faded, and Ahn’s grew. But in ho’s before bros, Ahn refused to make a move until she was sure Olive moved on. Olive, seeing Ahn/Jeremy’s connection, lies about a date she had, and before she gets caught, locks lips with post doc Dr. Evil, er Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman). At first he’s pissed, but since his funding is about to expire unless the university sees him as a long term fit, Olive and Dr. Carlsen agree to fake date each other for mutual benefits. The one variable they didn’t count on, was love.
Since the whole movie is about PhD candidated or PhD qualified teachers, The Love Hypothesis was never going to deviate from its tried and true formula. So there’s only really one thing that makes or breaks it: do Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman work as a pair. Short answer: yes, but with complications. Neither of their characters are fully human. Reinhart comes closest with Olive, though the dialogue does NOT help her in that process. And poor Tom Bateman is basically given Roy Kent as a post doctoral fellow with dialogue and cadence I’ve never once heard and is clearly writer creation. However, two wrongs make a great right in this case. Reinhart and Bateman make those wildly unrealistic characters make sense together, somehow generating electricity from somewhere. The polar opposites make the charming part of each’s personalities shine just a little brighter: Reinhart looks damn effervescent next to the caustic Bateman, and he nails the deadpan misunderstanding of human emotion making his jokes tersely funnier. And romcom vet Claire Scanlon shoots the big sequences smartly enough that they sizzle the way you want them to (rotary sushi for the win!).
Props to the real PhD students, slavishly trying and hoping for their own medical breakthroughs to make the world a better place. Hopefully The Love Hypothesis will be stupid drivel you can laugh at in between lab sessions. Hopefully this movie will let you take code-2 error flirting, to use as dirty talk in the bedroom and spice things up a bit. But only a little bit, those results aren’t going to publish themselves.