SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Prime Video‘s The Love Hypothesis movie.
Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning – The following contains mention of sexual harassment. Help is available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673.
A cathartic scene towards the end of The Love Hypothesis, adapted from the best-selling book by Ali Hazelwood and now streaming on Prime Video, reaffirms the already solid bond between Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) and her best friend Anh (Rachel Marsh), the foundational relationship at the heart of the love story.
After all, it’s for Anh that Olive starts the “harebrained,” to quote Hazelwood, scheme of fake dating one of Stanford University’s most notorious professors, Adam Carlsen, also known as Dr. Evil for his exacting manner with graduate students. Unfortunately, Adam’s supposedly “close” friend and colleague, Harvard’s Dr. Tom Benton (Arty Froushan) gets between Olive and Adam momentarily when he sexually harasses Olive, but he can’t come between her and Anh.
“It really speaks to their friendship and how they view one another that Olive goes to her to her best friend. Of course she goes to her best friend. She’s assaulted and looking for comfort and to finally admit the truth – something that’s been weighing on her – that she does feel guilty about for lying to her friend, even though it is for her friend’s benefit,” Lili Reinhart told Deadline.
Tom weasles his way between Adam and Olive professionally as well when he offers Olive a spot on his lab bench for her pancreatic cancer research the following year, but he injects the offer with the threat that she would need to sleep with him to earn the spot, trapping her in a hotel room under the guise of bringing her a coffee. In the hotel lobby, he corners Dr. Carlsen as and hints that Adam might hold Olive back all the way in California when she leaves to continue her research in Boston.
“Of course, she’s going to go to her safe space when something like that happens, and she doesn’t have family. Her family is Anh,” Reinhart continued. “So she goes to Anh and finally reveals the truth and tells her what happens with Tom Benton in in the hotel room. It’s a climactic moment between the two, and for the plot, obviously, but also just for Olive having kept all of this inside. I think it finally just has to come out, and it’s cathartic to see her have that release with her best friend.”
Costar Bateman wouldn’t use the word “excited” for the scene in which he embodies a Darth Vader march to go confront Tom about the issue and put the perpetrator in his place.
“When an abuse of power takes place, there’s no such thing as a winner. But in terms of addressing something that’s taken place like that, it felt, I guess, good to be able to do it because these things operate in the shadows. When people behave like this and abuse their power like that, the only way it can continue is if it is allowed to continue, if it’s concealed and hidden from people,” Bateman told Deadline. “So to do what Adam does, which is to kick the door down literally and expose that, it’s incredibly brave. It could risk a lot of things, but it’s the only way that behavior like that is stopped. So I guess it felt good in the moment for the character to be able to do that, but honestly, that sort of section of the film is such a delicate one that. There was no great moment for it.”
The confrontation, captured on social media, makes way for the final step in the equation of a romantic comedy or drama that contains a third act breakup or dissolving of a fake relationship – the admission of feelings between the couple in question. After Olive catches the video, she runs to the building where Adam has just interrupted Tom’s lecture, ready to have a conversation about where they stand.
“It’s a huge scene. It’s where they admit they love each other. That scene was challenging for many different reasons. It was so important for us to make that scene right. So many things had to land to make that scene a success. There was a lot of discussion about the things that they say to each other because it is going off the cuff from the book,” Reinhart said. “The language that they use has to be within their world. They are using science still when they’re talking about love because they’re hiding behind it. It’s funny, they’re trying to be honest with each other, they’re still hiding behind these words that are so flowery and sciencey, and these phrases that they’re throwing out there because they’re being vulnerable with each other, and that’s scary.”
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In true scientist fashion, Olive first proposes that she received ‘false positive’ results, or made a Type 1 Error, from their fake dating “experiment,” meaning she fell for Adam and assumed he reciprocated her feelings. He then introduces the concept of a false negative or Type Two error, meaning he projected that he didn’t love Olive when he did. They then draw the conclusion that he ultimately “contaminated the experiment,” by pretending there was no affect when there was (his feelings for her), so she proposed they start over with their project.
“I think we got it there. We landed the plane, and I think it’s a beautiful scene. But even just playing with the ‘I love yous.’ That scene was being massaged up until the day we shot it, and even on the day, we were still playing with different versions of it,” Reinhart said. “It was a very talked about and highly discussed scene because we wanted it to be perfect.”
Bateman also pointed out that the classic get together for real moment stood out with specific aspects that make it unique in the broader canon of romantic comedy and drama films.
L-R: Lili Reinhart and Adam Bateman in ‘The Love Hypothesis’
Photo by Philippe Bosse
“Because we have the benefit where we are now in 2026, we have so many romantic comedies that are part of our consciousness. We all know the momentum, where they’re going. It’s hard not to fall into cliché. So that was very important for us to make it feel very real to [Adam and Olive],” he said. “I think the science helped that because it was unique to this story, so it made it feel fresh. I still remember shooting that scene, and it surprised me that it was there.”
“I can still remember [Lili] calling ‘Adam,’ and I turn, and the scene, it surprised me that it was there, which was great. I think it sort of felt very authentic in that way, and I love playing it. It was really fun, and even reading it, I sort of go, ‘Whoa!’” Bateman continued. “In the romantic comedies, that sort of chasing them down at the airport moment, there’s a build up to it. Whereas this, it happened because it’s all to do with the Tom Benton stuff, and then she sees the phone [recording] of it. It happens so quickly; it almost sneaks in the back door, and suddenly you go, ‘Oh my God, I’m at that moment in the movie, and I didn’t really see it coming.’”
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