TL;DR – A very straightforward romantic comedy, with a touch more going on under the hood than you would first suspect.
Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.
Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription used to watch this film.
The Love Hypothesis Review Introduction
Today we are looking at a truly interesting film. On the surface, it is a very well-executed, if straightforward, romantic comedy. Two oddball characters who have nothing in common find love through the prism of shenanigans. We have gotten Solo Mio, One Night Only, & Finding Emily with the same underlying structure this year already. However, the moment you dig even a centimetre under the surface, it becomes one of the more fascinating films I have seen all year.
So, to set the scene, Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) is not having the best day when some expired contact lenses make her whole world blurry on the day of her graduate school interview. But disaster averted, Olive makes it into Stanford University, where she meets her bestie Anh (Rachel Marsh), her unrequited crush Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), and roommate Malcolm (Jaboukie Young-White), which is good because Olive is all alone in her life outside of university. The one thing Olive wants is to work in Dr Thomas Benton (Arty Froushan)’s lab, and he just let her know that he will be teaching in Stanford for the next month. It is a major opportunity, or a walking disaster waiting to happen. Which is what is happening when she cons Anh into thinking she is in a relationship, so Anh feels okay dating Jeremy, which leads to her maybe kissing ‘Dr Evil’ Dr Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) to keep up the ruse, and shenanigans follow as Dr Carlsen agrees to set up the pretence of a relationship for the review committee … making a love hypothesis.
