The Love Hypothesis Review: Lili Reinhart Brings Charm to a Flimsy BookRom-Com

The BookTok romance adaptation boom shows no signs of slowing, and Amazon Prime Video‘s The Love Hypothesis arrives as one of its most eagerly anticipated entries. Based on the viral novel by neuroscientist-turned-author Ali Hazelwood, the film pairs Lili Reinhart — best known for her turn as Betty Cooper on Riverdale — with a fake-dating premise that should play to her strengths. Yet for all its promising ingredients, the movie often feels like it’s sprinting through its own plot, delivering a likable lead performance atop a skeleton of a story.

Lili Reinhart: The Ideal Lead for a Nerd-Romance

Reinhart has spent much of her career proving she can elevate weak material through sheer screen presence. From Riverdale through films like Hustlers and Look Both Ways, she’s built a reputation for making the implausible feel genuine. Her casting as Olive Smith, a socially awkward Stanford biology PhD student, taps directly into that skill set.

Olive is written as a character who is simultaneously bookish, physically striking, clumsy, and quietly fierce — someone who presents sweetness to the world but isn’t afraid to drop an expletive when the moment demands it. Reinhart navigates these contradictions with natural comedic timing, particularly in the film’s cold open, where a bleary-eyed Olive, blinded by expired contact lenses, panics before a graduate interview and then declares her cancer-solving ambitions to a brusque professor in a lab bathroom.

Her performance evokes the broad, impossibly charming energy of early Big Fat Liar-era Amanda Bynes, especially during a key sequence in which Olive and her co-star must sell a fabricated relationship to a suave Harvard lab director played by Arty Froushan. It’s the kind of scene that makes you wish the rest of the film matched her commitment.

The Plot: Convoluted and Rushed

The central fake-dating setup in The Love Hypothesis is where the film stumbles most noticeably. Olive’s backstory — she’s an orphan whose mother died of pancreatic cancer, inspiring her own pioneering research into early detection — is the kind of emotional foundation that could anchor a more deliberate narrative. Instead, the film rushes through essential setup in a handful of scenes.

Olive bonds quickly with fellow grad student Anh (played by Rachel Marsh), whose bold personality is signified by her collection of “feminism” T-shirts. When Anh declines a date with Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay) because she knows Olive has feelings for him, Olive panics and kisses the first man she can find — Dr. Adam Carlsen, a handsome and cold scientist nicknamed “Dr. Evil” by the student body. It turns out Adam also needs a pretend girlfriend to convince university administrators that he’s staying put and won’t lose his grant funding.

The premise is workable but thin, and the film never adequately explains why Olive would risk her academic standing on such a scheme, or why Adam agrees so readily. Among the many fake-dating movies that have flooded streaming platforms in recent years, this one ranks among the least motivated.

Tom Bateman’s Uneven Turn as Dr. Adam Carlsen

If Reinhart is the film’s ace, Tom Bateman is its most significant liability. His portrayal of Adam oscillates between unfeeling automaton and swoonworthy romantic hero without ever settling into a coherent register. The character is written with hints of neurodivergence — task-oriented, socially blunt, and intensely logical — which is an interesting choice for a male lead in a romantic comedy, but one Bateman doesn’t fully exploit.

There are moments where his natural charisma breaks through, particularly during an unexpectedly sensitive, female-gaze sex scene in which a line reading that was presumably supposed to land as “you’re incredible” somehow arrives as “you’re edible.” It’s a disarming beat that actually elevates the film’s otherwise flagging heat. But for the most part, Bateman looks like he’s doing a tall, dark, and handsome leading-man impression rather than inhabiting a fully realized person.

The BookTok Adaptation Wave: A Crowded Genre

The Love Hypothesis arrives amid a crowded wave of BookTok adaptations that have become one of the most reliable subgenres in modern romantic comedy. The CoStar-produced films — Regretting You, Reminders of Him, and the massive hit-and-miss It Ends With Us — have drawn both audience enthusiasm and critical skepticism. Meanwhile, The Summer I Turned Pretty and this summer’s Off Campus, riding the cultural momentum of Heated Rivalry, have shown that BookTok properties can generate genuine buzz.

Directed by Claire Scanlon, a veteran of Netflix’s 2018 romcom wave best known for Set It Up, and written by Sarah Rothschild, The Love Hypothesis tries to ride the same current but lands with less impact. The film chains together a predictable procession of tropes — the unavailable man, the gay best friend, the enemies-to-lovers arc — set to a jaunty score that does little to mask the formulaic structure.

At one point, the film even swings abruptly into territory that feels like a holdover from the novel’s reported origins as Star Wars fan fiction, introducing a comically antagonistic force that seems tonally disconnected from the rest of the narrative. These inconsistent tonal stops and starts suggest a creative team unsure of what kind of movie they wanted to make.

What Works: Reinhart’s Warmth and Genuine Effort

It would be easy for a review of a film this flawed to dismiss it entirely, but Reinhart deserves genuine credit for bringing warmth and commitment to a role that could easily have become grating. She wears her mousy shade of brunette, her slightly dated wardrobe, and her inconsistent voiceover with good grace, selling lines like “My dopamine is surging!” and “Your work on circulating tumor cells is groundbreaking!” with a straight face that makes them endearing rather than cringe-inducing.

The film also earns some goodwill by acknowledging its characters as distinctly task-oriented, possibly neurodivergent individuals who approach their fake relationship with the methodical language of a scientific experiment — complete with control and variable terminology. It’s a small but welcome detail in a genre that often treats its leads as decorative rather than dimensional.

Verdict: All the Right Ingredients, Missing the Magic

The Love Hypothesis ultimately proves that you can assemble every recognizable ingredient for a successful rom-com and still miss. Lili Reinhart is the real thing — a performer capable of making even thin material feel worthwhile — but she can only carry a film so far when the script, editing, and tonal consistency don’t meet her halfway.

For fans of Ali Hazelwood‘s novels, BookTok enthusiasts, or Reinhart admirers, the film offers enough charm to justify a streaming evening. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that movie magic has never been a science — no matter how many experiments the characters insist on running.

Where to watch: The Love Hypothesis is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

Entertainment, Books, Online, Internet, Leisure, Literature, People, Romantic Comedy, Streaming, Amazon Prime Video, BookTok, Ali Hazelwood, Lili Reinhart, Tom Bateman, Film Review, Movie Review, Fake-Dating Movies, Netflix, Riverdale, Positive, Critics Review, Film, Cinema, Comedy, Drama, Romance