Lili Reinhart makes awkward behaviour believable by committing to it without apology. We rate her comic timing and sincerity, though The Love Hypothesis shows how much a thin romance can ask of a capable lead.
Fi1m perspective
In The Love Hypothesis (2026), Lili Reinhart's Olive Smith kisses a professor and proposes that they pretend to date. Reinhart commits to the arrangement without pausing to reassure us that she knows how unlikely it is. Her timing keeps Olive interesting when the writing offers little beyond the next expected complication. We warmed to Olive because Reinhart treated her awkward plan as something worth attempting. It is a useful demonstration of what she can do, in a film we cannot readily recommend.
Her breakthrough as Betty Cooper in Riverdale (2017–2023) gave her sustained practice at making heightened material believable. She moved into a higher-profile film ensemble with Hustlers (2019), then took leading roles in romances. Chemical Hearts (2020) asked for vulnerability in a darker role, while Look Both Ways (2022) required her to distinguish two possible lives for the same woman. Her open expressiveness is well suited to keeping these broad premises human. The risk, as The Love Hypothesis makes clear, is that a script starts relying on her sincerity to do too much.
Claire Scanlon gets pleasure from the friendships in The Love Hypothesis and from Reinhart's handling of awkward situations. The central romance is much less persuasive, and the harder material is hurried through when it needs time. Reinhart gives the comedy life, but she cannot make the relationship convincing by supplying more energy. Too much of the work of keeping us interested falls to her comic timing. We would recommend the performance to her admirers, with considerable reservations about the film around it.
She has also taken executive-producer roles on Chemical Hearts, Look Both Ways and The Love Hypothesis. Her producing work includes development, casting and post-production. That does not tell us who was responsible for a weak scene, but it makes the choice of material harder to ignore. We would like that involvement to secure scripts which ask more of her than making familiar complications agreeable. For the next romantic comedy, a relationship worth believing in would be a useful place to start.
Biography
Lili Reinhart is an American actress. She was born on 13 September 1996 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Reinhart portrayed Betty Cooper in the television series Riverdale (2017–2023). Her film roles include The Kings of Summer (2013), Hustlers (2019), Chemical Hearts (2020), Look Both Ways (2022) and The Love Hypothesis (2026), in which she played Olive Smith.
