The Love Hypothesis: BookTok romcom lacks spark on screen

Popular on BookTok and seemingly packed with all the ingredients of a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy, The Love Hypothesis arrives on screen with plenty of expectations – but struggles to generate the chemistry its premise demands.
Based on Ali Hazelwood’s bestselling novel, the film stars Lili Reinhart as Olive Smith, a brilliant but awkward biology PhD student at Stanford. Olive is devoted to her research into pancreatic cancer detection, a subject linked to the death of her mother. Her carefully ordered academic life is disrupted when she enters a fake relationship with Dr Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman), an intimidating scientist known to students as “Dr Evil”.
The setup is classic romcom territory. Olive needs to convince her friend Anh that she has moved on from Jeremy, while Adam needs a pretend girlfriend to reassure university administrators that he plans to stay at Stanford and protect his research funding. Their staged romance, inevitably, begins to develop into something real.
Yet the transition from fake dating to genuine attraction feels rushed. The screenplay moves quickly through familiar enemies-to-lovers beats, leaving little room for the emotional connection that could make the romance convincing. What works effortlessly on the page often feels mechanical on screen.
Reinhart, however, gives the film much of its charm. She plays Olive with warmth, awkwardness and strong comic timing, making even some of the film’s clunky dialogue work. Her expressive performance helps keep the character engaging when the story itself loses momentum.
Bateman’s Adam is less successful. His character shifts between a cold, intimidating academic and a conventional romantic hero, making the transformation feel uneven. The two leads have moments of chemistry, but not enough to sustain the film’s central love story. Directed by Claire Scanlon and adapted by Sarah Rothschild, The Love Hypothesis also arrives amid a growing wave of BookTok adaptations. Unlike some of its predecessors, however, it rarely finds a distinctive voice of its own.
The film has the right ingredients – a popular novel, an appealing cast, fake dating and an enemies-to-lovers romance. But on screen, the formula produces more familiarity than fireworks.