You guys, it is out! The film adaptation of my beloved Reylo-fic-turned-bestselling-original-romcom is out! And it is so! Much! Fun!

Premise, for anyone who's managed to dodge all of both the book's massive hype and my endless gushing: Olive Smith is a biology PhD candidate at Stanford University who gets herself into a pickle when she lies to her best friend Anh and pretends she's seeing someone new in order to ease Anh's conscience about dating a guy who she's head over feet (iykyk) for but is convinced Olive likes too. But then Anh catches Olive in the lab late one night when she's supposed to be on a date with her fictional beau, and in a panic lest her lie fall apart, Olive grabs a random guy in the corridor and kisses him in front of Anh. The guy? Dr. Adam Carlsen, biology professor and notorious asshole who the students are all terrified of. But instead of getting angry, to Olive's astonishment, Dr. Carlsen leans into the charade and agrees to continue posing as her boyfriend. Turns out Stanford is cutting his research funds because they think he's about to defect to another institution, and he thinks that having a steady girlfriend on campus will help convince them he plans to stay put. It's a romcom, so: fake dating shenanigans ensue. Real feelings develop. A misunderstanding threatens to sunder them forever, and then finally they confess their love and ride off into the proverbial sunset together.

This adaptation stars Lili Reinhart as Olive and Tom Bateman (hilariously, the real-life husband of Rey Starwars who Olive is based on) as Adam. Reinhart is incredibly charismatic and really carries the whole thing, but I also appreciated Bateman's take on Adam - he brought out all the assholishness and stilted social awkwardness that the book tells us about but never really shows. He is not the darkly charming Adam Driver lookalike of my heart, but I did get a very good laugh out of the shots of him storming Kylo Ren-like down hallways and sending student after student from his office in floods of angry tears.

The supporting cast are also absolutely stellar. Anh's BFF chemistry with Olive was perfect, and I adored her other close friend/roommate Malcolm, who in book form I liked but was not especially attached to. Both of them absolutely nailed the awkwardness of still very college-minded grad students suddenly forced to spend social time with an established professor (in adaptation, he has become Malcolm's supervisor, which makes the whole absurd dynamic even better). The script added two great parallel scenes that don't exist in the book, one where Adam has to attend a wild party with Olive's friends followed by a second where she has to attend a faculty mixer with his colleagues. In the book, we mostly understand Adam and Olive's age/status difference and the disconnect between their two worlds through Olive's highly subjective, insecure, not-always-reliable internal monologue. It was really satisfying to see it made so concrete.

There are a lot of other changes to the story, but imo they're all similarly well judged. They've smoothed out some of the rough edges that come from the book being both a debut novel and originally conceived as a fanfic - the most outrageous contrivances are scrapped altogether, and the rest streamlined into a more convincing relationship trajectory. Most significantly, this version of Adam has not been secretly pining after Olive since their chance first meeting years ago, but instead falls for her during the course of the fake relationship. As a fan I'm a little sad about this because pathetic pining Adam is of great personal appeal to me, but as a film viewer I think it was a good call, both because the depth of feeling would have struggled to translate into the compressed movie format and because, to be honest, it would probably just have come across as creepy. I was also a little sad that they cut the whole character of Holden, Adam's book best friend, but he does clutter the story a bit and they very much did need the screentime for other things.

The third act doesn't entirely come together and that's mostly the fault of the source material. The large majority of the book is devoted to Adam and Olive's fake relationship, with the last few chapters speedrunning a big villain reveal, heartwrenching breakup, swift resolution and happily-ever-after; it's crowded even on page, basically. The filmmakers tried hard to streamline that part too, but even with their changes and excisions, a whole bunch of stuff just HAPPENS all at once in the final half hour or so and none of it gets any time to breathe. But I can forgive that, because everything that comes before is as funny and steamy and straight-up delightful as I hoped it would be. The film really captures the feel of the book if not its every detail, and while it's not about to supersede the book in my heart, I am so glad it exists.