Love at First Sight Parent Guide

Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) has a bad habit of forgetting to charge her phone and a tendency to being late. Both of these factors cause her to miss her flight to London for her dad’s wedding by four minutes. Luckily for her, those two factors also cause her to meet Oliver (Ben Hardy) in the airport. As the two start talking, they find they have a lot in common. Once on the plane, they discover that they are seated next to each other and now have a trans-Atlantic flight to get to know each other.

As the plane lands in London, Oliver gives Hadley his number, but she loses it as her phone dies again, and he’s already out of sight. In an unfamiliar country and with a wedding on her schedule, Hadley decides to take a chance on fate and try to find Oliver again. What are the chances of finding one man in a city of eight million people?

It’s hard to find a modern romance flick that doesn’t involve an extremely toxic relationship or oodles of negative content. As someone with zero patience for the romanticization of abuse, there are very few romance movies I actually like. Luckily for me, Netflix has anticipated my needs and released Love at First Sight which manages to be mushy in just the right ways, feature healthy adult relationships, and contain very little objectionable content.

The love story between Hadley and Oliver is charming and sweet without being corny. They are both fully formed characters with lives outside of dating and it’s understandable why they would be attracted to each other, as they have important things in common, which is strangely lacking in a lot of on-screen relationships. Their families are also fleshed out characters who add depth to our protagonists’ motivations and emotional states.

This isn’t the deepest film I’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just a sweet love story and that’s enough. With very little negative content aside from one F-bomb and some social drinking, I would recommend this movie for tween and teen audiences. At the very least it would expose them to a healthy and mature romance rather than the abusive ones most teen media presents! As a secret romantic despite my cynical exterior, I really enjoyed this movie. Dare I say it was love at first viewing?