The Love Hypothesis review: Does BookToks beloved STEM romance get the adaptation it deserves?

Remember making elephant toothpaste in science class? You’d combine water, yeast, soap, hydrogen peroxide, and food coloring, and watch a tower of colorful foam erupt from a beaker.

Not long after, the foam would subside, leaving nothing but soapy water and the fond memories of a brief foray into the world of chemistry.

Watching The Love Hypothesis is a lot like that.

Adapted from Ali Hazelwood’s novel of the same name , a BookTok favorite, The Love Hypothesis details the fake dating romance between biology PhD student Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) and professor Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman).

It's full of chemistry, both figurative and literal, and like the elephant toothpaste, it's a bubbly blast that'll have your insides fizzing.

Yet despite this pure fun, not to mention two solid leading performances, The Love Hypothesis is missing one key ingredient that would truly make its experiment stick the landing: yearning.

SEE ALSO: Fall movie preview: All the 2026 films you need to know about The Love Hypothesis brings BookTok's fake dating fave to the screen.

Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman in "The Love Hypothesis." Credit: Prime Video Like Hazelwood’s book, itself reworked from her Reylo fanfiction , The Love Hypothesis cannily deploys several beloved romance tropes within the world of STEM academia, with fake dating chiefest among them.

Stanford PhD candidate Olive is a ball of sunshine who's as sweet as the sugar bomb coffees she loves to order.

She cares deeply about her research into pancreatic cancer, as well as her found family: fellow students Anh (Rachel Marsh), Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay), and Malcolm (Jaboukie Young-White).

While Olive has harbored a crush on Jeremy, she also knows that he's interested in Anh, and vice versa.

However, Anh refuses to date Jeremy because she doesn't want to hurt Olive.

For Olive, that leaves her one choice: pretend to be dating someone else so Anh thinks she's over Jeremy.

Olive's lie spirals until she kisses the first man she can find in front of Anh.