The Book Started as a Steamy Star Wars Fanfic. Now the Movie Adaptation Is Here. Uh-oh.
In Sex Reviews , writers offer a sober critical assessment of the sex scenes in new films and television series. This installment contains spoilers for The Love Hypothesis .
While the covers of Ali Hazelwood’s bestselling novels blend right in with other contemporary millennial romance fare, what’s between the pages is distinctive for the genre. Hazelwood, a former neuroscience professor, favors a combination of STEM milieus (two books set at Stanford, others at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, MIT, and an Arctic research center) and STEM heroes and heroines (every person in a Hazelwood book is an engineer, a scientist, or a game developer) with what can sometimes be extremely detailed and extensive sex scenes. Her Not in Love series and her campus romance Deep End can barely be read in public, so flushed will your face become. The Hazelwood fantasy is something that can only be described as “best-case Bay Area”: nerds with broad chests who, when tested, display an unexpected ability to apply themselves … both in and out of bed.
Now, the Amazon Prime romance adaptation machine has come for Hazelwood. The Love Hypothesis , her debut novel from 2021, is about Olive, an up-till-now-sorta-asexual biology Ph.D. candidate at Stanford, who ends up “fake dating” a tenured professor, Adam, a cranky stickler who’s every student’s bête noire. (Olive needs to convince a friend she’s partnered so the friend will feel OK dating Olive’s former crush; Adam needs to prove to his department he’s committed to the university, not a flight risk, so that they will release his research funds.) Adam is not on Olive’s dissertation committee, the book hastens to stipulate, meaning this relationship does not constitute a violation of academic integrity—though in the course of the plot, their alliance raises several ethical questions. (Hazelwood, among other predilections—a Hazelwood heroine tends to be physically tiny; a hero is always huge—loves an age gap.) Prime’s highly anticipated movie version of The Love Hypothesis stars Lili Reinhart (best known as Betty from Riverdale ) and British actor Tom Bateman as these fake-then-real lovers. But does the movie—could any movie—give us that good old Hazelwood buzz? Slate senior writer Rebecca Onion and Slate staff writer Nadira Goffe discuss.
Nadira Goffe: Well, what can I say, Rebecca? We’re 90 minutes into this 112-minute film, and we’re only just now getting our first sex scene. But this isn’t just the first sex scene, it’s also the only one in the whole movie. Normally, I would be OK with that, but come on, this is an adaptation of an Ali Hazelwood book! Let’s do better at understanding our source material here. It doesn’t help that this moment also feels like the only true instance of physical intimacy the couple displays throughout the film’s nearly two-hour run time. As is expected with any fake-dating plot, the earlier parts of the movie are riddled with moments of forced intimacy, where Adam and Olive struggle to put on a show for their friends and colleagues before they’re comfortable with each other: Olive awkwardly puts sunscreen on a shirtless Adam’s back, Adam hesitantly kisses Olive’s forehead, etc.
Admittedly, the few kisses they share before this are good. But that’s about all The Love Hypothesis has to offer us outside of this intimate scene right here. There is no moment of: We started off with a normal kiss but got carried away . At no point do the protagonists struggle not to touch each other as their chemistry evolves, something that any good romance should deliver. Before they get biblical here, they don’t even hold hands unless someone else is looking.
In fact, there’s not much lead-up at all, until Olive and Adam are getting dinner after presenting at a science conference in Boston. They hold hands, but pull away when they realize it, and go on pretending they were never touching. On the way home, when Olive’s high heels begin killing her feet, Adam carries her, bridal style, all the way back to the hotel where, due to some usual romance-plot kerfuffles, the two have been forced to share a room. Olive, who forgot to pack pajamas, changes into a big T-shirt that shows most of her legs; Adam, who sits on the edge of his bed, gets caught off guard by his sexual attraction and suggests they just go to bed. Olive, though, steps in between his legs and kisses him. Rebecca, you’ve read the book much more recently than I have. What do you think about what happens next?
Rebecca Onion: Nadira, I am somewhat ashamed to reveal that, much like Olive and Adam, we have faked everyone out—in this case, our beloved Sex Reviews readers, who expect to read our highbrow analysis of more than just one mid sex scene. But we did it to make a point about the kinds of romance novels that make good adaptations for a romance-hungry streamer like Prime. Sure, in The Love Hypothesis (novel version), the percentage of pages devoted to sex are relatively few for a Hazelwood—it’s no Deep End (seriously, that one’s for the truly thirsty). But if you look back at the major sex scene in the novel, with my apologies to any gentle readers of Slate.com who don’t think we mean it when we say Sex Reviews, you find moments like these:
Adam “fits her entire breast in his mouth. All of it.”
During the lead-up to their interlude, Adam “cups his cock almost absentmindedly, stroking and gripping every once in a while.”
Adam slides Olive’s underwear to the side and finds she’s aroused: “She was glistening, swollen and plump to her own eyes, way too far ahead, considering that they’d barely done anything.” (This idea, that a woman could be so wet it’s embarrassing, is a classic romance novel trope.)
They have trouble fitting his penis, which is “enormous” like every romance-novel penis, into her vagina. They figure it out when Adam “angles Olive’s knee just so, spreading her legs in a way she simply hadn’t thought of.” (This is the Ali Hazelwood “competent people are competent at everything” STEM kink in action.)
Adam goes down on Olive and “sucks on one of her lips with a loud, wet noise” and then inserts his tongue … needless to say, she loves it.
OK. I will stop. I know we are not Sex Reviewing the Ali Hazelwood novel The Love Hypothesis . But I need the contrast between this sex scene and what you get in the Prime movie to be clear. Because what you get in the Prime movie is a whispery pop song, a bunch of kissing, two hot people sort of softly lit on hotel sheets, then like 10 seconds of cunnilingus, some missionary, and some girl-on-top action, all resulting in a vaguely pleased look on Lili Reinhart’s face. The entire fevered, super-juicy vibe of the many pages of sex in the novel is completely gone.
The other major thing that’s different is that, in the book, Olive is almost asexual, rarely attracted to anyone, so having sex with someone is a big deal, and she and Adam talk about this fact a lot more before they do all that work to fit his enormous penis in there. All of that “I’m telling my new lover my deepest secrets” sweaty, intimate stuff is pretty much gone in this movie.
I just am not really sure, now that I’ve seen the proof, that Hazelwood romance novels are a good match for Amazon Prime. I feel like they wanted a regular rom-com, and they made The Love Hypothesis into one! Am I overthinking this, Nadira?
Nadira: You know that meme from the 2005 film version of Narnia where the lion, Aslan, tells the White Witch, “ Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch, I was there when it was written ”? Well, this is one of those moments where the deep magic did need to be cited, and there’s no one better at consulting our primary sources and getting textual than you, Rebecca! Thank you for this service.
To your question: I think risking scandalizing our readers with your astute rundown of the novel scene was needed precisely because you’re not overthinking this at all! A great deal of Hazelwood’s work subsists—nay, succeeds—on the idea that bookish, smart, reserved women can actually have raunchy, satisfyingly wild sex. Her books aren’t as quirky (in the rom-com fashion) as they are kinky, which is intentional. Hazelwood does offer good premises for tamer fare, but it would require a lot to turn one of her novels into something quaint and charming; instead, she spends most of her pages detailing characters who are actively working through pretty traumatic life events, often compounded by the sexism they’re simultaneously facing as women in STEM academia ( something I asked Hazelwood about in our 2023 interview ).
This is all to say that I agree with you: Prime wanted a rom-com, but The Love Hypothesis (novel) isn’t quite that. Stripping the book of all of its grittier bits practically strips it of everything that makes it so interesting or engaging to its many fans. And, though the movie tries to honor the book in other ways—the book is reformatted from Hazelwood’s Star Wars fanfiction , which centered around the intensely divisive romance between the franchise’s characters Kylo Ren and Rey; in a deep cut, the actor who plays Adam here, Tom Bateman, is the real-life husband of Daisy Ridley, the actress who starred as Rey in the recent Star Wars trilogy—it ultimately falls flat at that mission. And I say this as someone who would list the romantic comedy as one of my top three absolute favorite genres of media.
Nadira: And just like that, we’ve reached the end of our Sex (singular) Review! (This is laughable, are you laughing?) Now comes the time in our program where we rate how flushed and sweaty this made us on a scale of 1 to 10. I don’t have much to offer The Love Hypothesis except for a whopping: Meh! I, unfortunately, felt next to nothing, which is a shame, considering how hard Lili Reinhart, a major marketing force for this project, is trying to make something out of this movie. (Kudos, girl; love your outfits .) I’m going to give The Love Hypothesis a 1 out of 10 on the sex front. What about you, Rebecca?
Rebecca: I’m really so sorry. It’s a 1 from me, too. I would say “maybe Netflix will do better with Deep End ,” but I’m worried. Since Heated Rivalry is the only romance adaptation I’ve ever seen that delivered as much spice as its source material, I’m looking at you, HBO, to do justice to our steamy STEM authoress: Might I recommend Hazelwood’s Not in Love , which nobody seems to be adapting yet? I promise you won’t regret it.