A pretend relationship with very real consequences
Olive Smith wants to reassure her friend Anh that she has moved on from Jeremy. An impulsive kiss with professor Adam Carlsen produces a solution that quickly becomes a new problem: maintaining a relationship other people believe is real. Rules and mutual benefits seem to make the arrangement manageable, at least while both participants can describe it as a performance.
The complication is that a public explanation can begin to shape private behaviour. Spending time together, responding to other people's assumptions and deciding which boundaries matter all create experiences that are real even if the original agreement was not romantic. Olive's academic confidence does not automatically supply a clear method for interpreting those feelings.
The academic world and the cast
Lili Reinhart plays Olive and Tom Bateman plays Adam. Rachel Marsh appears as Anh Pham, Nicholas Duvernay as Jeremy Langley and Jaboukie Young-White as Malcolm Browne. Claire Scanlon directs from Sarah Rothschild's screenplay, adapting Ali Hazelwood's novel. The setting is academia, with Olive pursuing a PhD and Adam holding a professor's position.
That professional context adds another layer to the familiar fake-dating premise. Reputation, hierarchy and future opportunities exist alongside friendship and attraction. The film is a fictional romance, so its depiction of those relationships should not be treated as guidance about how real academic workplaces ought to handle conflicts or professional boundaries.
For readers and romantic-comedy viewers
The US classification is R. Choose it for an adult audience that enjoys a relationship beginning with an agreement the characters expect to keep under control. Reading the novel first is optional; newcomers can understand the core arrangement without knowing the later complications.
A useful conversation afterwards is whether rules make an emotionally uncertain situation safer or simply postpone the difficult discussion. Another concerns what Olive can learn through observation and what she must actually ask Adam. The scientific language of the title gives those questions a playful frame, while the romance depends on the possibility that another person's feelings cannot be guaranteed in advance.
