If you’re a Netflix subscriber, then you probably know the drill by now; the streaming service will recruit a pair of telegenic stars and pair them up for a romantic comedy – more often than not adapted from a novel – that takes a pasting from critics but still manages to stake out a spot at the top end of the most-watched charts. Remarkably, though, Love at First Sight has failed to tick off one of those boxes.
In an exceedingly rare turn of events for one of the streaming service’s rom-coms, director Vanessa Caswill’s take on Jennifer E. Smith’s literary smash The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight has found widespread critical acclaim, putting reviews and reactions on an even keel for one of the first times ever.
At the time of writing, the film holds an impressive 81 percent approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, ever so slightly ahead of its 80 percent user ranking. To put it lightly, that very rarely if ever happens when sparks fly on a Netflix romance, almost all of which have sucked at least a little bit.
Not only that, but Love at First Sight has also secured one of the platform’s strongest debuts of the year, with FlixPatrol revealing that it’s debuted as the number one movie in a massive 74 countries around the world. Clearly, Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy are proving irresistible as they meet cute on a flight from New York to London before desperately trying to reconnect, even if you won’t win a prize for guessing how it all resolves itself in the end.
