I’m just gonna straight-up say it: The Love Hypothesis is joyful nonsense. That may be my pull quote. Just rip that Band-Aid off right now. The thing about The Love Hypothesis is that it proves Lili Reinhart is ready to be a rom-com star. She is effortless. She hits every single beat and mark, even when the film around her doesn’t make sense. That is the true evidence of a rom-com queen: someone who can take what is essentially a mediocre or even below-mediocre concept, a script that frequently becomes nonsensical, and even a co-star who might be miscast or delivering a stiff performance, and somehow make the whole thing entertaining anyway. The more a rom-com queen can pull off basically by herself, the better. Consider this proof of life for Lili Reinhart and evidence that studios should take her seriously in this genre, because I enjoyed The Love Hypothesis almost entirely because of her.

Of course, I’m also supposed to believe Reinhart’s Olive Smith is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford working toward curing pancreatic cancer, which, I hate to say, is a bit of a stretch. Based on Ali Hazelwood’s novel, The Love Hypothesis has Olive randomly kissing Dr. Adam Carlsen, played by Tom Bateman, who has a reputation as one of the most intimidating professors in her department. Both of these actors really took off after I lost my vision, so I have no idea what either of them actually looks like. I just assume they’re attractive because romantic comedies usually cast attractive people unless part of the gimmick is convincing somebody they’re not attractive before eventually revealing that, surprise, they were attractive the entire time. Here, though, Bateman has decided to play Adam like he has some sort of personality disorder. It’s difficult to encapsulate exactly what he’s doing, but it reminded me a little of Alan Tudyk in Resident Alien, where Tudyk is intentionally awkward and out of place because he is literally playing an alien. Bateman is basically doing that, except with occasional mean comments thrown in because Adam is supposed to be this tough professor everyone hates while simultaneously remaining likable enough to function as the romantic lead. I almost wish they had leaned into it further and made him go full Lewis Black, just yelling and screaming at everything. Give me a romantic comedy with Lili Reinhart and Lewis Black. If you’re going to do it, go all in. Don’t give me this halfway version where Tom Bateman seems to be trying really hard to approximate human behavior when there are plenty of people whose natural vibe already screams, “I hate everything about the world around me.”

Olive’s best friend Anh, played by Rachel Marsh, has feelings for Jeremy, played by Nicholas Duvernay, whom Olive had previously been seeing. Olive wants Anh to believe she has moved on, so she impulsively kisses Adam and eventually winds up fake-dating him. How is this a Stanford-level hypothesis? I don’t know. But it’s enough to get the kiss going and provide the necessary momentum toward a romantic comedy, because a movie about a woman trying to cure pancreatic cancer while falling in love with a professor who is not technically her professor is apparently not enough. I’m not sure this arrangement makes things substantially less awkward, but roll with it. I promise that if you can accept the nonsense and allow Lili Reinhart to hold your hand along the way, you’ll be fine. Adam has his own reasons for participating because his research funding has been frozen amid concerns about his future at Stanford, and appearing settled and committed to staying could help his situation. That definitely sounds like exactly how Stanford University would dole out research money. I’m sure there’s a panel sitting around thinking, “Well, we have money to give out. Which professors are currently dating doctoral candidates? Make sure they get the money first.” Don’t judge it based on the proposed research. Judge it based on whether everybody thinks they’re cute together.

The film is directed by Claire Scanlon, some poor woman who apparently cannot get a movie out of a streaming service. Her first feature was Set It Up, which was trapped at Netflix, and she followed that with The People We Hate at the Wedding, starring Allison Janney, Ben Platt, Kristen Bell and Cynthia Addai-Robinson, which was an Amazon original. She also directed Netflix’s interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt special, Kimmy vs. the Reverend. So apparently nobody will let Claire Scanlon put a movie in theaters. I don’t want to say take the hint, but I also don’t see anything particularly special happening in these films. At the same time, I would love to advocate for more romantic comedies getting theatrical releases because this is one of the genres that has suffered the most from the rise of streaming. We see fewer and fewer rom-coms getting significant theatrical pushes, and some of the ones that do make it there struggle at the box office. The genre needs people who can become reliable anchors again, and I genuinely think Lili Reinhart could be one of them.

The Love Hypothesis doesn’t necessarily do much for Reinhart’s career beyond proving that she can carry a movie even when the movie itself is nonsense and her co-star is playing a stunted, angry man-child. The film plays around with the inevitable will-they-or-won’t-they scenario as though any of us believe these two people might complete their fake-dating experiment, shake hands and politely part as friends. Have we never seen a romantic comedy before? Olive isn’t even presented with much of an alternative. Jeremy technically exists as somebody she liked at one point, but the film never really treats him as a viable option. Other films in this genre have done a much better job making the lead seem like she actually has a romantic choice to make. Here, Olive’s larger decision eventually becomes one between love and opportunity, and if romantic comedies have taught us anything, it’s that love tends to put up a pretty good fight. I’m not telling you how the movie ends, but if this is your genre, you know that as well as I do.

At around an hour and fifty minutes, it’s also a little long for what it is and could have benefited from being breezier. The supporting cast is fine, including Jaboukie Young-White as Olive’s friend Malcolm, but I would have liked more from Rachel Marsh as Anh. Because Olive is trying to bamboozle Anh with this fake relationship, the movie has to keep her boxed out of certain parts of Olive’s life when their friendship could have been one of the film’s stronger elements. Other characters pop in and out as necessary, but this is unquestionably Reinhart’s movie. She has to sell the comedy, the romance, the friendship, the science, the increasingly ridiculous fake-dating scenario and eventually the more emotional material. Somehow, she does.

I know this sounds like a negative review. Most of the movie really didn’t work for me, which is why, when you see that Fresh rating next to the score down at the bottom, you need to understand just how good Lili Reinhart is in this. She took a movie that probably shouldn’t work and made me want to recommend it simply so other people could enjoy her performance. Maybe if enough people watch The Love Hypothesis, somebody will give her another romantic comedy. I think this is her genre. Don’t even bother with everything else right now. Build up that rom-com résumé. It’s a struggling genre anyway, and it could use a couple of anchors like we used to have. There was a time when you could reliably go to the theater for Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Lopez in a romantic comedy specifically shaped around what they did best. Those movies lived or died on the shoulders of their stars, sometimes alongside the right co-star, and audiences knew what they were getting because those performers were perfect for the roles they were being given. Occasionally somebody would wander outside that comfort zone and remind us why the comfort zone existed. That’s how you end up with Meg Ryan in Proof of Life, Julia Roberts in The Mexican, Sandra Bullock in All About Steve or Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes. Lili Reinhart deserves the opportunity to build that kind of identity within this genre.

The audio description here was perfectly fine. Amazon was apparently more invested in immediately thrusting me into something else than allowing me to listen to the credits, so I didn’t catch who provided the audio description. I certainly didn’t have any problems with the track, though, and there are some interesting visual beats it has to communicate, including a sequence where Olive puts in expired contacts that leave her vision blurry enough that she cannot clearly see the person in front of her, something that becomes important later in the film.

So my love hypothesis is this: Lili Reinhart plus romantic comedy equals success. Now I need studios to take enough chances on her to actually test my hypothesis. The Love Hypothesis itself is definitely flawed, frequently ridiculous and held back by a central romantic performance that never entirely clicked for me, but Reinhart is such perfect casting that she casts her own glorious shadow over almost everything that doesn’t work. Sometimes one performance really can drag an entire movie across the finish line. The Love Hypothesis is joyful nonsense, but thanks to Lili Reinhart, it’s joyful nonsense I’m willing to recommend.

Fresh: 6.0/10