Love at First Sight

Hadley, twenty, misses her flight to London at JFK. She meets Oliver, a Yale student, at a charging station, they eat together and end up seated side by side on the next flight. When they land her phone is dead and they lose each other. Hadley is in London for her father's wedding; Oliver is there for his mother's memorial. Vanessa Caswill directed, adapting Jennifer E. Smith's 2011 novel, whose title is the statistical probability of love at first sight, which is also exactly Oliver's research subject at university. Haley Lu Richardson plays Hadley and Ben Hardy plays Oliver, with Rob Delaney, Sally Phillips and Dexter Fletcher in support. The film's clearest device is its narrator: Jameela Jamil speaks from outside the story and also turns up inside it in a series of small parts. At the end the narrator tells us the couple will marry and stay together for fifty-eight years. It went up on Netflix on 15 September 2023. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 76 percent, the consensus crediting the gimmick and the leads' chemistry. Metacritic stops at 55. Who it is for: viewers after a light romantic comedy and stories built in a single night. Who it is not for: anyone irritated by coincidence being pushed past its limit. The film stacks chance on chance and makes no secret of it.