When I first read The Love Hypothesis, I ate it up. And then I proceeded to read every single book Ali Hazelwood had written up to that point, and every single one of them was a hit for me. Hazelwood is an author I will hear no criticism about. So when The Love Hypothesis adaptation was announced, “excited” didn’t even begin to cover how I felt.
I devoured every bit of news and watched Lili Reinhart’s TikToks like it was my job. When we finally started getting promotion images and teasers, I was fully ready for this to be my favorite movie of the year. Like-minded Ali Hazelwood fans felt the same, counting down the days until the release by sharing the scenes they were most excited to see come to life and fangirling hard over Lili and Tom Bateman’s casting as our leads, Olive and Adam. The only problem? Anticipation and excitement for adaptations often lead to disappointment when the film is finally released. The Love Hypothesis is a story close to many readers’ hearts. Could the movie possibly live up to that? Here’s my full review of The Love Hypothesis adaptation.
What is The Love Hypothesis about?
Stanford PhD candidate Olive Smith has had a crush on Jeremy for years. Unfortunately for Olive, Jeremy only has eyes for her best friend, Anh. When Olive learns that Anh turned Jeremy down, despite also having feelings for him, Olive makes it her mission to see them get together. To do that, she needs to convince Anh she’s happily in a relationship of her own.
Dr. Adam Carlsen (Dr. Evil to his grad students) needs funding to continue his research, but the department head considers him a flight risk. With an opportunity to convince Anh that Olive is happy and for Adam to show he’s serious about staying at Stanford with his “serious girlfriend,” the two decide to fake date until their goals are achieved. Neither of them expects their experiment to go haywire and produce real feelings.
My Review of The Love Hypothesis movie
Lili Reinhart is a rom-com star
From the very beginning, Lili Reinhart, who plays Olive in the film, has been this movie’s biggest champion. She shared our first peek at the film on her TikTok, inspiring fervor among fans. In multiple interviews, she’s said how much she’s listened to readers and worked to make their dreams for this adaptation come true. Did the film stick the landing on that front? Not really, but Lili’s performance as Olive was exactly as I pictured while reading.
As Olive, Lili is vulnerable, anxious, hopeful, and open. We see this in her friendships with Anh and Malcolm, who color Olive’s life outside of her relationship with Adam. Olive’s entire motivation for entering her arrangement with Adam is to make Anh, her only family, happy. She forgives Malcolm easily when he takes his anger out on her, and she encourages Adam to be a better mentor throughout the film. While parts of Olive’s story were cut from the film, the version of her onscreen is well-rounded and believable, due in no small part to Lili’s performance.
Beyond Riverdale, Lili hasn’t been in many notable releases, but I’d love to see her in more rom-coms. She carried the romantic heart of this adaptation; I only wish Tom Bateman matched her energy.
Adam… could be better
I’ll be honest in saying I was always underwhelmed with Tom Bateman’s casting as Adam Carlsen. I’ll also be honest in saying prior to this film, I had never seen him in anything. Adam, to me, has always been more of a hot nerd type, while Tom’s portrayal gives a simply conventionally attractive man. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it didn’t work for me.
Unfortunately, Adam was the weakest part of the film. While Lili gave dimension and life to Olive, Tom’s monotonous delivery in an attempt to portray Adam as awkward didn’t land. Even in moments that were meant to show a different side of his character, like when he opens up about his grad school experience at the sushi restaurant, it felt one-note and lacking depth. As a result, his experience didn’t seem particularly harrowing, and his character felt unchanged from the beginning of the film to the end.
One of the major complaints readers have of the adaptation is the exclusion of Adam’s best friend, Holden, from the story. In the book, Holden humanizes Adam in ways we see nothing of in the movie. To make matters worse, Adam, known as Dr. Evil for his ruthlessness as an advisor, never really answers for the way he treats his students throughout the film. There are a handful of scenes where a student leaves his office in tears that are played for laughs, and even when he does attempt to be a softer mentor late in the film, it is immediately followed by a scene of him screaming into a shirt because the effort to be even slightly nice to a student was so challenging to him.
I’m all for a “he’s mean to everyone but her” trope, but it really doesn’t work in a story like The Love Hypothesis without meaningful character growth throughout the book. I’m not sure whether this is the actor’s fault or the screenplay’s, but the result was that Adam felt like a blank wall. Chemistry between leads can make or break a rom-com, and it was lacking in The Love Hypothesis, despite Lili’s best unanswered efforts.
Anh is the best friend we all need
Where Adam failed to jump off the page in the way I wanted him to, Anh, Olive’s best friend, was an unexpected highlight. She’s funny, loyal, and deeply kind to Olive from the very beginning. Truly, she’s the best friend a woman could ask for. She has Olive’s back in more ways than one throughout the film, turning down Jeremy because she thinks Olive has a crush on him and telling Adam what Olive could not in the name of protecting her friend. She shone in every single scene she was in.
“Chemistry between leads can make or break a rom-com, and it was lacking in The Love Hypothesis, despite Lili’s best unanswered efforts.”
I remember liking Anh in the book, but I loved her in the movie. At one point, she tells Olive, “It isn’t about them, it’s about you and me,” referring to the men in their lives. That statement couldn’t be truer, and it makes me wish this were a Booksmart-esque film about female friendship rather than a subpar rom-com about a lead doing her best to conjure chemistry out of thin air.
The story is there, but the heart isn’t
Book readers are always going to have something to be mad about in adaptations. While some of that criticism is valid (Holden’s character really is needed to round out Adam), other qualms aren’t. Of course we aren’t going to see Adam and Olive’s full chapters-long sex scene play out on screen in graphic detail. It’s a movie, and the medium will never go as far as books will on that front. Story beats will be condensed or altered to fit the constraints of a two-hour film, where we are inherently going to spend less time with the characters than we do in the books.
However, just because I acknowledge those changes have to be made to make a movie doesn’t mean their replacements were the right choices. We get several long, drawn-out scenes showing how awkward Adam and Olive are when their arrangement begins, while the scenes that show them growing closer and falling in love are relegated to montages. As a result, when we finally get to the scene where they express their feelings for each other, it feels completely unearned. Where are the fleeting glances? The accidental touches? The close calls? It’s as if the filmmakers realized they were running out of time and decided to simply throw them together without the requisite build-up.
In the end, the adaptation told the story of The Love Hypothesis, but it didn’t reveal its heart. On the page, this story is charming and emotional, filled with giggling-and-kicking-your-feet moments that make you feel giddy. The side characters are just as important as Olive and Adam. Adam, for his part, is more than just a hot man in a lab coat. All of the ingredients for a classic rom-com movie are there, but the execution refused to rise to the occasion.
Should you watch The Love Hypothesis movie?
Would it be utterly crazy of me to say yes here? Because I do still feel like saying yes, this movie is worth the watch. At the end of the day, it’s simply fine. But if you’re a reader who loves Ali Hazelwood, I do think you should watch this movie, if only because it is always fun to see how a book comes to life. Just prepare for it not to live up to your expectations, and for you to have strong feelings about what the movie got “wrong” about the book.
I want adaptations to succeed, and while my high hopes for The Love Hypothesis were ultimately dashed, I believe that the more book adaptations we see, the better. We can only hope that future adaptations of Ali Hazelwood’s work are more People We Meet On Vacation and less… this.
Garri James, Senior Managing Editor and Book Club Co-Host
As Senior Managing Editor of The Everygirl, Garri oversees the pitching, planning, and creation of all content. You might also find her name pop up as a contributor throughout the site, though she mostly works behind the scenes, leading the team in their creative efforts and ensuring they have everything they need to create top-quality content for our audience.
