Film Review: Love at First Sight is a charming if unspectacular rom-com

Haley Lu Richardson as Hadley Sullivan and Ben Hardy as Oliver Jones in Love at First Sight

Love at First Sight

★★★☆☆

Netflix

Love at First Sight (PG) isn’t actually a film about love, its narrator (Jameela Jamil) informs us early on — it’s a film about fate, and the statistical likelihood of meeting the perfect person.

Spoiler alert: the narrator is talking guff. When Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) misses her flight from New York to London by four minutes, she ends up chatting with Oliver (Ben Hardy), who offers to help recharge her phone. 

One thing leads to another, and soon — courtesy of a broken seatbelt buckle in economy — Hadley and Oliver are getting on famously up in business class. Seems like a pretty straightforward set-up for a rom-com, but writers Katie Lovejoy and Jennifer E Smith, and director Vanessa Caswill, revel in subverting the conventions and the audience’s expectations.

Mind you, they’re also aware that every successful rom-com thrives on the unscientific notion that opposites attract: Hadley is disorganised, reflective and nursing a badly bruised faith in men in the wake of her father jaunting off to London to remarry, while the ostensibly easy-going Oliver is actually obsessed with breaking everything down — love included — via statistical analysis.

Ultimately, of course, every rom-com depends heavily on its leading pair, and there’s a plausible, quietly fizzing chemistry between Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy, with the former brilliantly natural as the heartbroken Hadley, and they both get strong support (with Rob Delaney, Tessa Jones and Dexter Fletcher to the fore) in what is unlikely to be your favourite rom-com of the year, but is nevertheless a charming and sweet-natured affair.