‘The Love Hypothesis’: A Peer Review

Marking Scheme

16.5-20: First Class | 13.5-16.4: Upper Second Class (2:1) | 10.5-13.4: Lower Second Class (2:2) | 7-10.4: Third Class | 4-6.9: Fail (with right to reassess) | 0-3.9: Fail (without right to reassess)

Mark - 7

The Love Hypothesis is a movie about the university experience of extremely good-looking ‘nerds’ (or ‘neeks,’ for my British colleagues), so let us call the following a peer review.

Like all truly great films, The Love Hypothesis is a movie adaptation of a book that started as fanfiction. More specifically, it began life as Star Wars fan fiction, before becoming a bestselling romance novel and, eventually, this cinematic experiment.

The film follows Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart), a Stanford biology PhD candidate who, in an act of desperation, impulsively kisses Professor Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) to convince her best friend Anh (Rachel Marsh) that she has moved on from her crush. The kiss somehow evolves into a mutually beneficial fake relationship; Olive gets Anh off her back, while Adam gets to look sufficiently settled at Stanford to secure his research funding. Naturally, neither anticipates that their totally rational scientific arrangement might become romantic.

Now, Dr Evil (Dr Adam Carlsen, our male lead), reminded me of an unconvincing soap-opera doctor: Joey Tribbiani from Friends playing Dr Drake Ramoray, or McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy.  At one point, in true fan fiction fashion, Olive asks him, “Have you always been a villain?” He proceeds to explain his tragic backstory, which essentially amounts to the fact that a teacher was mean to him once. I am proposing an experiment of my own to all saint chemists and biologists: please ask your professors this question and report back.

Their sexual chemistry reaches its climax in perhaps the least sexy and most cringe-inducing sex scene I have ever watched. However, this might also be the only reason the movie receives a passing grade, because it really does put the com in rom-com.

There are, of course, stories of chem-lab romances in St Andrews’ labs too...but that is just a rumour. And I suppose that is what this movie felt like: a rumour passed down many, many, many times.

But in the name of scientific objectivity, the true failures of this film were its overdone and ultimately unfulfilling tropes: the professor-student romance, the fake dating, the brooding male academic, and the sexually inexperienced student.

Then there is the scientific inaccuracy. Olive Smith wears a mini skirt in the laboratory, which my fourth-year colleague studying chemistry deemed completely unacceptable for safety reasons, before mocking the film with the sentence, “My culture is not your costume.” It seems that one of the only scientific things about the film were the science jokes...like when Olive accuses her professor of having “contaminated the experiment” after he confesses his feelings for her.

To top it all off, the film makes sexual harassment in academia so blatant and so expected that it almost becomes a parody of the very real sexual harassment experienced by many people in academic spaces. What might have been an opportunity for a sharper critique instead feels strangely convenient, as though even institutional misconduct has been neatly written into the rom-com formula.

In the empty scientific jargon of this movie, I would say the outcomes narrowly satisfied the baseline criteria for acceptance, despite numerous confounding variables, methodological flaws, and a frankly  very questionable research environment.

Illustration by Marios Diakourtis