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While everyone else at school was dreaming about their future spouse and white wedding, I was dreaming about my future friends. I didn’t have the platonic relationships I was told I would have by popular 2000s kids TV shows like The Sleepover Club, with my friends and I braiding each other’s hair and spilling all of their secrets.
Watching The Love Hypothesis on Prime Video brought the romance of that childhood dream flooding back. In fact, I think the new movie has got the love story at its core all wrong — this isn’t a passionate affair between PHD student Olive (Lili Reinhart) and “evil” Doctor Adam (Tom Bateman), but an example of enduring connection between friends Olive and Anh (Rachel Marsh).
Of course, I get why the former route has been taken. Not only is the film an adaptation of the popular Ali Hazelwood novel of the same name, but Amazon is on a roll with its abundance of young-adult romantic dramas. You can’t tune into a streamer that’s developed bangers like Off Campus, Stirling Point and Every Year After and expect it to take a different tack here.
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Is this taking the safe option? Probably. Does The Love Hypothesis tick the rom-com boxes it needs to? Undoubtedly. But while I don’t think fans of the book will be disappointed, I can’t help feeling that The Love Hypothesis has missed fully exploring its most enriching love story.
The Love Hypothesis is far from the greatest love story ever told — but it’s fun
In a nutshell, Olive is a third-year biology PhD candidate at Stanford researching early pancreatic cancer detection. In order to convince her best friend Anh that she has completely moved on from a crush, Olive impulsively grabs and kisses Adam in the lab hallway. The two make a mutually beneficial agreement to fake date each other… though that fakeness doesn’t last for long.
You can see, and correctly guess, all of the story beats just from me writing that short synopsis. There are no surprises, and things will end exactly where you expect them to. For some people, this is what they’ll want — a reliable, sexy and giving rom-com in these desolate times? I get the appeal. Just don’t expect anything that will blow your wind.
Even though Adam is barely tolerable for the majority if The Love Hypothesis, the ensemble cast is clearly at home in the genre. We want to be Olive as she wrestles between her head and heart, attending cool house parties and industry mixers. We want to shout at the characters who do her wrong, and we truly feel like her ride or die through the process.
The highly-anticipated hotel room scene, I can confirm, is hot. It’s not the most explicit or sexiest moment in a movie I’ve ever seen, but you can’t deny the natural chemistry sizzling between our two leads. Take everything you felt during the split second teaser in the above trailer and amplify it by 1000.
Yes, The Love Hypothesis largely plays it safe, with its direction, narrative and unbelievably underwhelming soundtrack all evidence of that. But the journey from start to finish is fun, understanding, and convincingly sincere. It’s tough work being a woman as it is, let alone a talented woman in STEM.
This should really be a love story between two best friends
But enough about textbook love… let’s talk about friendship. My heart bursts for the love between Olive and Anh, and their unrelenting willingness to go above and beyond for each other. I mean… Olive is fake dating someone just so her bestie feels comfortable enough to pursue the man she likes without crossing a boundary. That’s a girl’s girl alright.
Neither of them compromise on their smarts, or dedication to their future careers, let a man come between them, or change who they are to fit in with their university’s social norms. They are fully themselves at all times, allowing their value and worth to shine through in every aspect of their lives.
If anything, this is what I hope viewers will take away from the new Prime Video movie. At the end of the day, there are no greater romances than your friendships, and those of us that have such friendships are incredibly lucky to have such invaluable wells of support and love in their lives.
The Love Hypothesis might be marketed as a standard enemies-to-lovers romance, but strip back the tropes and you’ll find a love letter to friendship — and this, for me, is the mark of a job well done.
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