A cheesy rom-com, Love at First Sight (check out our review of the movie here), gives what the viewers have been waiting for since the beginning. Oliver and Hadley acknowledge their feelings for each other after a few tense minutes of being apart. They also get together with their family to have joyous celebrations, one a wedding and the other a memorial, one marking the beginning and one marking the end.
In a story of opposites, where fate is under the control of free will and life and death are celebrated equally, the only thing that remains the same is Oliver and Hadley’s destiny. They bump into each other multiple times after Hadley misses out on her flight by just four minutes. Coincidences pile up, they get to know each other better, and it becomes a true love at first sight.
Recollecting the Ending of Love at First Sight
The climax of Love at First Sight begins with Hadley Sullivan reaching Peckham. Fate was on her side as the boy everyone talked about at Andrew’s wedding turned out to be Oliver Jones. Hadley witnesses the farewell ceremony for Ollie’s mother, Tessa, taken aback by the fact that a living person was celebrating her imminent death.
Hadley senses that Oliver is distraught about Tessa’s condition. She finds out that the elderly woman refused chemotherapy and an anti-inflammatory diet even though Ollie mentioned that she could live for six more months. Frustrated by his mother’s choice, Oliver lashes out at Hadley for not wanting to pour his emotions onto “just a girl who he met at the airport.”
The tiff between Hadley Sullivan and Oliver Jones brings tension to an otherwise calm and romantic pace and builds up a happy ending. Magically, the narrator, now in the role of a passer-by, gives Ollie the red backpack belonging to Hadley. Eventually, Jones delivers a moving speech on how he “tried to measure his mum’s life with numbers to make sense of the world,” but Tessa wasn’t a number – she was his mum.
Meanwhile, Hadley got lost in an avenue and had to phone her father to pick her up. They get closure after the younger Sullivan forgives the elder for not putting much effort into the first marriage. The scene then shifts to Peckham, where Oliver finds the invitation letter for Andrew Sullivan’s wedding to Charlotte in Hadley’s bag, with the address being Greenwich.
Val Jones talks sense into his son, leading to Oliver finally being able to operate on love rather than statistics and search for Hadley in Greenwich. They completed the kiss that had been pending since they left the airport.
Love at First Sight Ending Explained: Nothing Is Left To Fate Anymore
Fate is a strong theme in the film Love at First Sight. The narrator, while continuously talking about probability, also mentions how fate can be controlled by humans if they desire it.
In the beginning, Hadley leaves her first impressions of Charlotte to chance. She even considered ditching the wedding in which she was the special guest. Only after talking to Oliver does she not leave things to fate and take responsibility as a daughter. We get to know in her last conversation with Andrew that Hadley harbored no ill feelings and adored Charlotte.
Unlike other narrators who just stand by and watch the action from close, Jameela Jamil’s character as a narrator interferes in the story. She presents Oliver with the backpack forgotten by Hadley which eventually leads to their reunion. Hers is an interesting role, switching from being a moralist character to one that has substance in the plot.
Hadley losing her backpack and her track back to Greenwich also has a deeper meaning. Love at First Sight highlighted how lost the heroine was after her falling out with Oliver. The background music played the lyrics “Lately, I have become lonely” while she desperately tried to seek help from strangers who either turned away or flat-out refused.
Both characters eventually get closure with their families. Initially angry at his mother, Oliver recognizes the folly of living a constrained life and prolonging the suffering of his mother. His mathematical, logic-operated thinking is also influenced by his father, Val, who tells him that he would have married Tessa even if he knew that she would have cancer in the future.
Previously disheartened by the statistical data of long-term relationships and love marriages, Oliver Jones, in a sense, threw caution to the wind as he leaped to Greenwich and finally believed in the feeling of love at first sight.
The Statistical Probability of Love At First Sight
Subtly, the rom-com movie written by Jennifer E. Smith name-dropped the book from which it originated. The lines gave a nice touch to the adaptation when Oliver Jones was jokingly asked by Hadley Sullivan as to which probabilities was he researching all this while.
The Statistical Probability of Love At First Sight was published in 2011. Fans found it to be a warm and witty story about destiny, first love, soul mates, and perfect timing. Even though it took them a decade to adapt it into a movie, they didn’t make many changes of their own and gave a good film despite shooting in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Comparing the source material to the adaptation film, Oliver and Hadley cross paths over luggage in the book while a phone charger is the reason in the movie. Also, Love at First Sight makes viewers wait for their first kiss until the end while in the book, Ollie and Hadley kiss after deboarding the plane.
The rom-com also has an in-person narrator. She is depicted as the manifestation of Fate or Cupid itself – influencing the actions and decisions of the main characters with her words.
Love at First Sight ends with the narrator delivering a mini-monologue about the rest of Hadley and Oliver’s life together, mentioning that they’ll be married for 58 years and have at least one daughter. That being said, the caption reads “the beginning” at the end to signify that it was the start of Oliver and Hadley’s happy life as a solid couple.
