Put black powder under the right metal salts and you can make the sky explode in basically any color you want. Humanity figured this out hundreds of years ago. We still do it all the time.
Take whatever the fuck ‘a BookTok Phenomenon’ is, prepare it for our streaming libraries using a rom-com scaffold we've all seen before, and you can produce The Love Hypothesis—a movie that has everything required for combustion and still refuses to explode on cue.
Before we get into it, I should formally recognize one of The Fifth Reel’s oldest editorial principles, established approximately eight seconds ago.
Formula is not criminal.
Rom-coms recycle plots like people with their shit together recycle aluminum cans. That’s fine. The rare genuinely original exemplars of the field can be phenomenal, but if rom-com fans demanded a new contribution to narrative theory every time they got their fix, the genre would produce about three movies per decade.
So let’s accept the pitch can often be just “Remember that thing you like? Two new hot people are gonna do it.”
Perfectly acceptable.
The point here is that The Love Hypothesis is not being dragged before the tribunal merely because somebody found its screenplay chassis sitting behind the studio under a tarp. We have nothing against classic cars.
But fucking hell, this particular formula has some miles on it.
The Love Hypothesis takes the whole fake-dating story out for a ride in the hopes there’s still some joy left in it. This is a trope that already makes regular passes through your content libraries in its purest form constantly—Love Hard (2021), Wedding Season (2022), About Fate (2022), Someone Borrowed (2022), Anyone But You (2023).
It also has a knack for coming through town again every December with essentially the same sales pitch as part of the Christmas Industrial Complex—Mingle All the Way (2018), Holiday Date (2019), An Unexpected Christmas (2021).
And that bargain bin full of examples only encompasses the standard fake-dating bylaws. There is an entire body of case law. Some agreements permit sex but expressly prohibit feelings. Others say screw the dating part entirely and proceed directly to fraudulent matrimony.
But, again, the point is not that Hollywood needs to retire fake dating or formula rom-coms.
The point is that if you’re going to serve reheated leftovers, you’d better own a microwave.
And—well, shit—The Love Hypothesis appears to own one at first.
Glossing over this particular implementation’s backstory and the details of the underlying love pentagram required to get everybody into position, Olive (Lili Reinhart) and Adam (Tom Bateman) eventually arrive exactly where the blueprint needs them. They start fake dating for social reasons with enough interested third parties hanging around that they actually have to sell the relationship.
Early on, they’re pretty good at it.
The public-performance scenes understand exactly why this kit keeps getting dug out of storage. Olive and Adam must manufacture intimacy on command, which gives real chemistry permission to sneak into the room disguised as fake chemistry. They overplay things and then get uncomfortable. Enter some comedic effect.
Oooh, we’re cooking now.
After the first couple of scenes, The Love Hypothesis leaves no doubt that it understands the game plan. At least Reinhart and Bateman understand it. Even the other vertices of the love polygon—most notably Rachel Marsh as Anh—are assets to the film’s budding feel.
The problem comes when the movie reaches the later essentials of the whole setup and has to assemble what is typically the climax of these things.
Fake dating works because it begins with emotional liability protection. It fails, in just the way it’s supposed to, because that’s not how relationships work.
Once somebody has caught feelings, the two poseurs are right back in the same position anybody starting a real relationship is in. And somebody must walk into the open, bare their Hallmark-licensed soul, and say, “I know we said we were faking, but what if, like, we weren’t?”
And who knows how that’ll go.
Exposure is why the trope works.
The Love Hypothesis spends most of its runtime lovingly gathering all the rocket fuel, training the technicians, and preparing for launch and then walks away without—for all intents and purposes—hitting the fucking big red button.
Some viewers will barely care that the movie fumbles the formula’s ending, and I can’t fault them. If you’ve seen this story unfold before, it matters less where the live reading stutters. You came to watch that familiar thang performed by two leads who are pretty good together and walk away calling it a novel-enough experience. If this is your first movie night on this planet, though, the missing payoff matters more, to say nothing of the fact you’ve got way better options to start with.
The Love Hypothesis gets enough of the chemistry right to be enjoyable-ish. It just never delivers the reaction its own formula promises.
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