A CHARMING HALEY LU RICHARDSON ANCHORS SAPPY BUT SWEET ROMCOM 'LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT'

The last time we saw Haley Lu Richardson — at least, the “White Lotus” version of Haley Lu Richardson — her Portia was in an airport, leaving the murderous mayhem of Sicily (and one dead boss) behind and exchanging contacts on her phone with nice young Albie.

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Movies & TV Shows

Now, in an amusing bit of symmetry, we rejoin the charming Richardson at an airport again in “Love at First Sight” — with another young man, this time trying but failing to get his contact info into her phone. (Spoiler alert: one really needs to keep one’s phone charged when looking for love.)

It’s this theme of missed connections — and fate, and inadequately charged iPhones — that anchors the plot of this sweet, often moving but also painfully corny rom-com that survives on the appeal of Richardson and also her co-star, Ben Hardy, a couple that could triumph over anyone’s saccharine dialogue.

The Netflix film, directed by Vanessa Caswill, is based on the popular YA novel “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight” — a more interesting title, but one can understand the desire to avoid anything that could potentially be shortened in conversation to “Statistical Probability” (likely the least romantic title in the history of rom-coms).

In any case, those already fans of Jennifer E. Smith’s book will need no prompting to root for this couple who meet cute at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on December 20, which the film’s narrator tells us is the airport’s busiest day of the year (the narration is full of such factoids). On this day, we learn, Hadley Ella Sullivan, American, age 20 and 65 inches tall, is traveling to London but misses her flight by four minutes.