The Love Hypothesis runs its own experiment: put two scientists in a fake relationship and see if it turns real. Add a meddling best friend, forced proximity and other romantic comedy tropes, and the results are hardly surprising.
On September 23, 2026, The Love Hypothesis put that hypothesis to the test on Prime Video. Leading the film adaptation are Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith and Tom Bateman as Dr. Adam Carlsen. Olive is a brilliant yet awkward Stanford Ph.D. candidate. Adam is the notoriously grouchy professor known for tearing apart students’ work and breaking hearts in the process.
Disclaimer: Lots of spoilers ahead.
The Love Hypothesis Asks: Can Chemistry Be Simulated?
Every rom-com needs a central question, and this one asks something oddly scientific. If two people engages in fake dating for long enough, does real chemistry eventually take over?
Or was it there all along, just waiting to be measured? The movie spends its runtime testing that question, one awkward lab encounter at a time.
A Look at the Lore
Long before Olive and Adam hit the screen, they existed in a much messier draft. Ali Hazelwood’s story began as Reylo fan fiction in 2019. Tom Bateman, who plays Adam Carlsen, is married to Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Fans have also long connected Adam Carlsen’s name to Adam Driver, who portrayed Kylo Ren.
Olive’s first encounter with Adam is fittingly blurry like the meet-cute in the book. Her expired contacts leave her struggling to make out the face of the stranger she meets in a campus bathroom. However, she remembers what he tells her: her reason for applying as a research student is the best he’s heard.
From there, the film eases into a campus-life montage. There’s plenty happening around Olive, yet she remains disconnected from it all.
Then she enters a classroom, spots Jeremy Langley (Nicholas Duverney) and instantly develops a crush. Moments later, Anh Pham (Rachel Marsh) slides next to Olive.
The Experiment: Controlled Conditions, Uncontrolled Feelings
Anh becomes Olive’s chosen family almost immediately. The Vietnamese character in the book is reimagined as Filipino to weave family dynamics into the movie. It’s an interesting choice, but feels somewhat unnecessary to the plot of The Love Hypothesis.
Olive may be hopelessly distracted by her crush on Jeremy, but her vision is somehow 20/20 when it comes to the obvious attraction between Anh and Jeremy. However, Anh refuses to make a move because of girl code.
So Olive lies about having met someone new. She hopes it will convince Anh that she has moved on from Jeremy.
This is where things get ridiculous. Instead of going on the date night she claims to have planned, Olive is actually in the lab. She panics when she spots Anh heading there. Desperate to keep her lie alive, Olive approaches a man and asks if she can kiss him to fool her friend.
The whole sequence requires a serious suspension of disbelief. Olive has poor vision, she’s supposed to be intelligent, and she somehow decides that kissing a stranger is a logical solution to her problem.
Adam (jokingly) threatens to file a complaint. Olive reveals her reason in an attempt to stop him.
Then Adam makes an equally questionable decision. He calls Olive into his office and agrees to a fake relationship. He hopes having a serious girlfriend will convince his department head that he plans to stay at the university, and help him secure the research grant he wants.
Anomalies in the Results
Thankfully, The Love Hypothesis has plenty of scenes where Olive and Adam grow closer while pretending to be a couple. Instead of Anh being fooled, she sees through them, but doesn’t reveal so right away.
Then comes Tom Benton (Arty Froushan), who connects the conflict between Olive and Adam to the larger academic world. He offers Olive an chance to work in his lab at Harvard and discourages Adam from getting in the way. Later, he approaches Olive himself and makes the opportunity conditional on her having sex with him.
On screen, the development feels sudden and jarring. The book has more room to establish the threat he represents. The film removes Holden, a character who helps reveal a more human side of Adam while also giving readers more context for Tom’s character. Without him, the film also has to restructure the conflict and its resolution.
Anh ends up playing a much larger role. Her scene with Olive afterwards is one of the more genuinely touching moments in the movie. After everything she has done for Olive, she proves once again why pretending to date the scariest professor on campus was worth the hassle.
Then comes the confrontations. The film is full of fun and sweet dialogue, but in the couple’s face-off, the false-positive and false-negative metaphors are cute in theory, but they land as too cheesy.
Still, the final emotional beat works. Adam admits that he has fallen in love with Olive. Then, he asks if he can kiss her and waits for her to give a clear yes before doing so.
The Love Hypothesis Review: Swoon-Worthy
Watching The Love Hypothesis for the first time after reading the book comes with some disappointment. Why does a romance marketed as a slow burn feel like it’s moving at double speed? Well, this is a movie after all.
Some of the book’s emotional development simply can’t make the jump to the screen intact. Characters are compressed, motivations arrive faster, and conflicts have to be resolved within a much shorter runtime. That makes the adaptation feel lighter and less layered.
However, the film holds up when judged purely as a standalone. Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman have the chemistry to sell it. Rachel Marsh’s character remains a standout, the friendship subplot gives the movie much of its heart, and the familiar tropes have enough charm to make their predictability part of the fun.
Hypothesis confirmed: swoon-worthy, flaws and all.
Source: Amazon MGM Studios
