The Love Hypothesis Review: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
The Love Hypothesis is a warm, funny, and genuinely charming Netflix adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s BookTok phenomenon that coasts entirely on the extraordinary chemistry between Isabela Merced and Glen Powell, even when the screenplay plays it far too safe with a premise that had room for considerably more bite.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Director: Vanessa Caswill
Release: September 23, 2026
Language: English
Cast: Isabela Merced, Glen Powell, Mason Gooding, Meghann Fahy
Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis spent a considerable amount of time at the top of every BookTok list worth mentioning. The novel, which follows a PhD student who kisses a notoriously intimidating professor to convince her friend she has moved on, became one of those rare cases where the internet’s enthusiasm for a romance book actually translated into real, sustained cultural conversation.
The adaptation was always going to carry that weight. The question was whether a film could capture what made the book feel special without simply copying its plot beats and calling it done. The answer, after watching Netflix’s version, is mostly yes. With caveats.
The story follows Olive Smith, a third-year biology PhD student played by Isabela Merced, who is brilliant, slightly chaotic, and deeply convinced that her research into pancreatic cancer could matter. To keep her best friend from worrying that Olive is still hung up on her ex, she does something spectacularly impulsive — she kisses the nearest available person outside a campus party.
That person happens to be Adam Carlsen, played by Glen Powell, a professor with a reputation for being brilliant, exacting, and approximately zero fun. Rather than making the moment worse by backing away, Adam leans in. What follows is a fake relationship, a real research crisis, and the slow, inevitable collapse of the boundaries both of them have carefully constructed around themselves.
Glen Powell was born to play Adam Carlsen. The role requires someone who can make arrogance feel like armour rather than personality, who can do intimidating and tender in the same scene without either feeling like a contradiction.
Powell does this with a lightness that makes the character immediately more appealing than the premise suggests he should be. His Adam is not actually frightening — he is just a man who has learned that keeping people at a distance is easier than letting them see the rest of it. Powell makes that readable in every scene without the film needing to explain it.
Isabela Merced is just as good, which matters enormously because chemistry only works when both performers are equally present. Her Olive is endearing without being clumsy-cute in the way rom-com heroines often are.
She is genuinely smart, occasionally self-sabotaging, and utterly believable as someone who has poured so much of herself into her research that she has forgotten to leave room for anything else.
The supporting cast adds genuine texture. Meghann Fahy as Olive’s mentor is warm and complex, bringing a subplot about the pressures women face in academic environments that the film unfortunately does not pursue as far as it should. Mason Gooding as Anh provides grounded, likeable support without becoming a prop.
The film’s biggest weakness is its academic setting, which feels decorative rather than integral. The pressures of PhD life, the funding anxieties, the politics of academic publishing, the specific exhaustion of being a young woman in a male-dominated science department — all of this is present but softened to the point where it becomes backdrop rather than texture.
If you have read our Minerva Academy Review, you will know how effectively a closed, high-pressure institutional setting can generate dramatic tension when a story leans into it fully. The Love Hypothesis gestures at that world without ever fully inhabiting it.
The fake-dating trope also plays out fairly by-the-numbers. Every beat arrives when you expect it. The misunderstanding that separates them in the third act is visible from roughly the forty-minute mark.
None of this ruins the film — it is, after all, a genre piece, and genre audiences understand the agreement they are entering — but it does prevent The Love Hypothesis from becoming genuinely memorable rather than simply enjoyable.
That said, enjoyment is nothing. Rom-coms live and die on their central pair, and this one has two people who make you actively happy to spend ninety minutes in their company.
Fans of You+Me Against The World and similar romantic dramedies will find plenty to love here, particularly in the quieter scenes where the script steps back and lets Powell and Merced just be two people figuring something out together.
Watch it on a Friday evening when you want something warm and easy.
The Love Hypothesis is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.