"This isn't a story about love. This is a story about fate. Or statistics. Really just depends on who you're talking to."
— Narrator
Love at First Sight is a 2023 Romantic Comedy, directed by Vanessa Caswill for Netflix and adapted from the 2011 Young Adult novel The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith.
Two strangers en route to respective family functions connect on a transatlantic flight from New York to London: clumsy 20-year-old literature lover Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) and uptight statistics geek Oliver (Ben Hardy). But when she loses his contact information, the two have to find each other again — with a little nudging from the cheeky narrator (Jameela Jamil).
The film costars Rob Delaney, Tom Taylor, Dexter Fletcher, and Sally Phillips. It was released on September 15, 2023.
Tropes:
- Absurd Phobia: Mayonnaise is one of Hadley's greatest fears. Coincidentally, her love interest Oliver doesn't care much for the condiment.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: In the book, Oliver's dad cheated on his mother and broke her heart. Here, they're Happily Married.
- Age Lift: Hadley and Oliver are in their late teens in the book, and their early twenties in the film.
- Daddy's Girl: Hadley was very close to her father before he moved to England and get remarried.
- Happily Married: In contrast to Hadley's divorced parents (and remarrying dad), Oliver's parents are deeply in love.
- High Heel Hurt: After wandering around London for too long, Hadley eventually swaps her clunky red heels for sneakers (not trainers, as she tells her transplanted father).
- Interactive Narrator: The narrator frequently appears to the characters in various costumes to nudge them along, and talks directly to the audience about the state of Oliver and Hadley's love story.
- Living Is More than Surviving: Oliver's mother is dying of cancer, but she refused treatment and wants to go out on her own terms — because she doesn't want to be alive but sick all the time or barely hanging on.
- Ludicrous Precision: The narrator frequently tosses precise statistics at the audience. For example, she tells us how many lights are on in London on December 21st, many neck pillows are on the flight, how long the wedding/memorial lasts down to the second, what percentage of guests are crying, and so on.
- Neat Freak: Organized Oliver is scared of germs (because of his mother's illness) and will whip out a disinfecting wipe unprompted.
- One Degree of Separation: Hadley is able to find Oliver after losing his contact information because she overhears some of her father's wedding guests saying they need to attend Oliver's mother's memorial at Peckham House. The Ludicrous Precision-loving narrator lampshades that the odds of their families having mutual friends is 0.2%.
- Opposites Attract: The narrator wastes no time establishing that Oliver and Hadley are very different — he's organized, hates surprises, and obsessed with using data to rationalize the world around him; she's a little scatterbrained and prone to leaving things behind. His phone is nearly always fully charged; her phone is always dying. And yet, as she cheekily informs the audience, they're going to fall in love.
- Wedding/Death Juxtaposition: Hadley's going to a wedding, and Oliver to a living memorial for his mom. She's dismayed that she assumed they were both going to weddings, when Oliver's essentially going to a pre-funeral.
