‘Love at First Sight’ Review: Sense, Sensibility and Statistics

It could also be a cliché to recommend {that a} streaming unique feels as if it had been created to serve an algorithm, however hardly ever is a film as brazenly besotted with patterns of information as “Love at First Sight,” on Netflix. Not solely is the film spinoff, however its story truly pivots on the statistics of romance, and by extension the supposed romance of statistics.

As in “500 Days of Summer,” the romance story whose material was recycled for this fleece pullover of a movie, “Love at First Sight” contains a narrator hyper-fixated on numerical values. Case in level: once we meet our two protagonists, Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) and Oliver (Ben Hardy), the movie encumbers us with a pedantic voice-over recitation of their heights, ages and common cellphone battery prices.

Based on the Y.A. guide “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight,” the film traces 24 hours within the lives of those two college students, who’re each flying to London for important household ceremonies. The pair meet cute at Kennedy International Airport, nap in conjoining business-class seats and really almost kiss in line for the bathroom. Jameela Jamil, maybe embodying the pair’s cosmic success, narrates their budding romance whereas showing in quite a lot of background roles.

The film, directed by Vanessa Caswill, hits its stride as soon as the lovebirds contact down throughout the pond, the place the stats subside and the solid, significantly Richardson and Sally Phillips as Oliver’s ailing mom, come aglow with genuine feeling. What are the chances {that a} premise as unimaginative as this one ought to emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama? Jamil would know.

Love at First Sight
Rated PG-13 for language and qualitative variables. Running time: 1 hour half-hour. Watch on Netflix.