Rom-coms tend to live somewhere between the familiar and the absolutely bizarre, sometimes both at once. Prime Video’s The Love Hypothesis, adapted from Ali Hazelwood’s novel of the same name and directed by Claire Scanlon, swaps the usual terrain — corporate boardrooms, reunited lovers in old neighbourhoods, contract relationships — for a laboratory, where a fake dating arrangement between a research resident and her professor turns into something steady and real.
Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) is a driven PhD student at Stanford, committed to finding a cure for pancreatic cancer, the disease that killed her mother. She wants to turn her loss into something meaningful, but constantly undermines her own worth — she’s more comfortable among the mice in her lab than with people. A loner, she finds her person in classmate Anh (Rachel Marsh). Olive is infatuated with fellow student Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), who likes Anh — but Anh won’t date him, unwilling to betray girl code.
So Olive lies that she’s seeing someone. One night in the lab, having told Anh she’s out on a date, she impulsively kisses the intimidating Dr. Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) — known around campus as Dr. Evil. Their fake dating farce suits them both: Adam needs a grant for his research and Olive needs Anh to believe she’s over Jeremy.
An experiment with unpredictable results
But this experiment in love brings something stronger and less predictable (after all, who would fall for Dr Evil) than either of them planned, even with its share of trials and doors closed along the way.
Olive and Adam become unlikely friends, softening each other’s rough edges — she helps him past his fear of needles and his habit of being sharp-tongued with his students; he pushes her past her fear of public speaking, sweaty armpits and nervousness and gets her to start believing in herself and her cause.
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When Olive is set to speak at a conference where Adam is the keynote speaker, people assume she used him to get there, but he shuts down the rumours — he believes in her work and is certain she’ll land the grant she needs on her own merit.
But their fake relationship has run its course and Adam wants her to stand on her own rather than lean on him, even as he privately worries she’s still hung up on Jeremy. Olive, for her part, assumes he wants out now that his own grant is secure.
Being a woman in science, the film makes clear, means working twice as hard while also navigating patriarchy and misogyny. When a colleague of Adam’s offers Olive her grant in exchange for sleeping with him, it’s the moment the meek Olive turns into a woman with a mission.
High on chemistry
The Love Hypothesis delivers what you want from a feel-good rom-com, even where it stumbles — and its strengths carry it through the rough patches. Chemistry, after all, is about combustion, and Olive and Adam generate plenty of it.
Reinhart is well cast as the smart, often funny, deeply unsure Olive. Bateman, playing a professor his students have nicknamed the spawn of Satan, is the perfect contrast — you watch the chinks in his armour widen as the usually gruff Adam lets his struggles show and it’s easy to understand why Olive falls for him.
Both characters live by strict rules, boundaries and logical frameworks — except where their feelings are concerned, which follow no logic at all, making you invest in them.
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A strength worth calling out: the film lets its supporting characters have arcs of their own. Anh, Jeremy and Malcolm are woven into Olive and Adam’s story rather than parked on the sidelines. There’s no scheming ex here — instead, a colleague of Adam’s who hides a sleazy streak under a charming exterior, a reminder that surfaces rarely tell the whole story.
The film also stays close to Olive’s commitment to her research, set against the demanding backdrop of academia. It’s honest about the specific pressures and hurdles women face in STEM and makes room for mutual support and for pushing back against workplace harassment.
The Love Hypothesis is a feel-good watch that packs in as much as it can inside a 90-minute runtime. There’s a fair bit of chemistry jargon that occasionally crowds out the slow burn it’s trying to build — but then again, when it comes to love, nothing is ever quite perfect.