Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love at First Sight’ on Netflix, a Rom-Com in Which ‘White Lotus’ Breakout Haley Lu Richardson Shines

Love at First Sight (now streaming on Netflix) gets off on the wrong foot right off the bat – that title. Generic. Humdrum. A platitude. And a warning sign that this movie is just another bland rom-com? Maybe. Thing is, a much better title was just sitting there, since the movie is based on YA novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith, whose Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between also became a Netflix film, and who apparently has a thing for putting big mouthfuls of words on her book covers. What may be a draw for this new film is the easy charm of its stars Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy, who pair up to possibly prove whether the thing in the title is a cliche-because-it’s-true type of cliche, or just a regular plain old cliche. Let’s see if they succeed.

LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: First of all, the narrator. Er, that should be The Narrator. She’s played by Jameela Jamil, and we not only hear her in voiceover, but we see her here and there in the film, playing a flight attendant and a passerby and a customs agent and a few other things, things that, in a video game, would render her an NPC. Sometimes, she breaks the fourth wall with a knowing glance, but that makes sense, since she’s talking directly at us all the time. The Narrator is here to spice up the story of two attractive young people who meet in an airport, and to act as an Agent of Fate, or possibly a Deus Ex Machina, maybe even a Serpent of Serendipity, since she sometimes nudges the plot along by seating our romantic leads next to each other on a plane or making sure one of them leaves a personal item behind so the other can deliver it and therefore contrive an opportunity for them to look soulfully into each other’s eyes. She’s kind of a love steward, I guess.

But Love at First Sight isn’t her story – she’s just here to KEWWT it up, to be narrative garnish for Hadley (Richardson) and Oliver’s (Hardy) inevitable life-merging. SHE’S an NYU student jetting across the Atlantic for her father’s (Rob Delaney) wedding. HE’S a Yale studier of statistics heading back home to London for something vague (which tells us there’s a reveal to be revealed later, when the movie needs a little more emo-juice to fuel the plot). The Narrator, as his her wont, doles out percentages and probabilities so we may compare and contrast these two characters – she’s always late for things and he’s always on time for things, and here’s a number that tells us how often they’re late or on time, which is “funny,” because who keeps track of such mundanities? One of the important things is, they both dislike mayonnaise, and if that doesn’t provide a rock-solid foundation for their happily-ever-after, I don’t know what would.

They meet at one of those airport charging stations – Narrator: her phone battery’s always dying, his is always at 94 percent – which leads to one of the movie’s best lines: “And he’s been charging my batteries ever since.” Ooh la la! (Don’t worry, you sex prudes – this movie is PG as hell, and I deem its official PG-13 status to be only the result of that one tame double-entendre.) They get a bite to eat and then board the same flight, and wouldn’t you know it, the universe makes sure Oliver’s seatbelt is busted, and therefore the Narrator-as-flight-attendant puts him right next to Hadley so she can grab his hand and squeeze when she white-knuckles it through takeoff. There’s a moment where they both end up in line for the lavatory and they lean in for a kiss but CLICKITY-CHUNK the door opens and we’ve got ourselves a good old-fashioned smoochus interruptus scene.

Love at First Sight pushes through the moments where most rom-coms would end, as they land in London with an hour of the movie left and go their separate ways, as real life would have them do, and here we have some hope that the movie will find a little honest truth in its characters and situations. And so, things are complicated on the ground for both of them. Hadley has feelings about this wedding, because her dad jetted off to England and then divorced her mom. Oliver convenes with his obnoxious DJ-wannabe brother so they can get to the thing that’s complicated, and has to do with their mother. Not only do our two lovebirds hate mayo, they’re also in dire need of a heart-to-heart with their respective parents. Yet The Narrator warns us that they may never see each other again, especially after he gives her his phone number and she loses it. But The Narrator – is she one of those trustworthy ones or one of those untrustworthy ones? NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Love at First Sight is kind of a Gen Z Before Sunrise, if you watered it down with a few familiar rom-com tropes. And as far as London-set rom-coms go, Rye Lane is dozens of times more charming and artful, so go fire up Hulu and watch it now, please!

Performance Worth Watching: Richardson continues to show considerable elevate-the-material skill with a relatively effortless, easygoing screen presence; in addition to her SAG Award-winning breakout role in The White Lotus, she’s also excellent in Unpregnant, After Yang and one of those apparent neo-classics I keep making reference to, The Edge of Seventeen.  

Memorable Dialogue: HOW could Hadley NOT fall for a guy who says, “Cumulus clouds. Best clouds ever!”

Sex and Skin: Just some kissing. The sex prudes win again!

Our Take: There are times when this Narrator stuff is too cutesy by half – it’s a contrivance that yields a couple of smiles but no big laughs, and is employed primarily to spiff up an off-the-rack kismet-romance. “There’s only a 0.2 percent chance that Oliver and Hadley’s families had mutual friends,” The Narrator says at one point, and I rolled my eyes, because this is just the movie attempting to patch its plot holes with the Spackle of Screenplay Self-Awareness. (I also wanted some footnotes citing the study yielding that statistic. That number seems too big!) As for the part where Love at First Sight keeps going where most movies of its ilk would end? Well, it manages to separate the principal couple and bring them back together, as expected, then does it again, and then does it again. So it’s not quite like all the other rom-coms in the sense that it repeats the same trope a few times, while also integrating slight variations on other tropes, such as the make-up-and-break-up development, the heartfelt speech in front of a crowd and the wacky supporting characters.

Add in some mediocre dialogue, and it’s clear the writing isn’t the movie’s strength, thus leaving the weight of the film on the cast’s shoulders. Or, to be crystal clear: Richardson and Hardy need to generate some electricity in order to run the pump to bail some water out of this boat before it sinks. And they keep it afloat for the most part, through the relatively drab Sigh, Life stuff of the plot that keeps our protags emotionally vulnerable and open to sharing with each other how Life right now is really making them Sigh. 

Director Vanessa Caswill keeps the tone relatively bright with some modestly delightful photography and bits of lighthearted comedy – although she hacks up a few relatively lengthy dialogue sequences, as if they were spliced together out of teensy bits of line-readings, signs perhaps of screenplay struggles. But going easy on movies like Love at First Sight is prudent; no one sits down to a YA romance adaptation expecting too much, and Caswill makes sure this one is a relatively low-stakes, knee-deep love story where no one is ever even close to drowning. As for The Narrator, well, she kinda drove me nuts until the very very end, when she narrates a sappy-ass conclusion that feels like a lite version of the final sequence from La La Land and, corny as it is, it got to me. Sometimes redemption arrives when you’re not quite expecting it.

Our Call: Love at First Sight had me on the fence until that final scene tipped the movie into STREAM IT territory. It’s no timeless rom-com, but for the target audience, it’s likely good enough. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.