The Love Hypothesis — Movie Review (Spoilers Ahead)
I don’t usually buy romance books. The ones I have were a gift from Jay. Actually, romance has never been my favorite genre. But apparently romance movies are a different story, because they keep finding me.
I watched The Love Hypothesis without having read the book, which I think worked in my favor. I wasn’t sitting there comparing every scene to something I remembered from the book or wondering why they changed this or that. I could just watch the movie and let it be what it was. And I liked it.
It’s cute, funny, a little ridiculous in the way romcoms are supposed to be, and I enjoyed watching Olive and Adam’s relationship develop. The whole fake – dating setup obviously isn’t something I’m expecting to happen in real life, but that’s kind of the point. Movies get to take these unlikely situations and turn them into something that makes you wish they could happen to you.
Near the end, Olive and Adam use Type I vs. Type II errors as the scientific metaphor for their relationship: Olive describes what happened as a Type I error —a false positive, essentially believing there was an effect when there wasn’t. Adam corrects her: it was a Type II error, a false negative — there was a real effect, but they failed to recognize it.
The beautiful part is that it turns the entire fake-dating experiment on its head: they thought the love was the mistake, when the mistake was thinking it wasn’t real.
