Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Love at First Sight’ follows the story of two strangers whose lives are changed forever after they cross paths with each other at an airport. Hadley misses her flight to London by four minutes and is forced to wait a couple of hours to get on the next one. In between this, she meets Oliver, who is also on the same flight. As they start talking, they become attracted to each other. When they think their paths will diverge, fate intervenes, and they find themselves next to one another in the fight for the next seven hours.
While their story begins as a romantic idea, they soon discover that finding love is easier than choosing it again and again. As they know more about each other, the decision falls on them. Will they act upon their feelings or let the opportunity slip? SPOILERS AHEAD
Oliver and Hadley Almost Don’t Receive a Happy Ending
When Oliver and Hadley first meet, they don’t give away a lot about each other, apart from the superficial stuff like their jobs, the nature of their travel, and their shared dislike for mayonnaise. They’re both dealing with some heavy emotional stuff. Spending time with a stranger with whom they can talk about trivial things while skirting around the issue brings them some relief, and they bond with each other.
Slowly, Hadley starts to talk about the deeper issues relating to her relationship with her father. Oliver empathizes with her and gives her some advice without judging her or her father. She also sees him as a kind person who likes to help others and genuinely cares about them. While Hadley became a skeptic following her parents’ divorce, she felt a sense of attachment with Oliver. On the other hand, he keeps his feelings close to his chest.
When the plane lands, Oliver gives Hadley his phone number, but she loses it after her phone runs out of battery. They are separated in the line where Hadley has to go for a customs check while Oliver finds his brother waiting to pick him up. Oliver goes to Peckham for his mother’s memorial, while Hadley attends her father’s wedding. It is not easy for them to be there, but they can’t stop thinking about each other.
After the ceremony and before the reception, Hadley has a four-hour break. In between this, she hears someone talking about a woman whose cancer was in remission after more than twelve years and whose son had to fly back from America for the memorial. This is the story that Oliver told her, and Hadley feels terrible that she didn’t know Oliver’s mother had passed away. She decides to use the break to go to Peckham and meet Oliver. She could be wrong, and it could be a different woman, but she chooses to take this chance.
When Hadley reaches there, she discovers that Oliver’s mother isn’t really dead. She is having a memorial while she is still alive because what use it is to get people to say all these good things about you when you can’t even hear it for yourself? Once again, she and Oliver come face to face, and when Hadley asks Oliver to be more expressive about his feelings rather than hide behind numbers and statistics, he gets angry. He says he didn’t think about sharing his deepest feelings with some girl he’d met on the plane.
Hadley is heartbroken to hear Oliver’s words, but this brings her back to reality. She decides to go back to the wedding but is lost because she left her backpack at Oliver’s place, and her phone runs out of battery. Eventually, she calls her father, and they have a conversation they should’ve had a long time ago. Her father reveals how he and her mother had stopped putting in the work in their marriage, and it came to its natural end when he moved to London. After talking to him, Hadley understands his point of view, and they settle their differences. They go back to the wedding and dance together.
Meanwhile, Oliver’s family discovers that he is giving up on Hadley, and they encourage him to go after her. They say exactly what she’d told him. He needs to give a chance to fate and life to do their own thing rather than relying on numbers and figures to make sense of everything. When Oliver says he has no idea where she might be, her parents find the wedding invitation inside her book, leaving Oliver with no excuse not to go after her.
In the end, it all boils down to the choice. Will Oliver choose to go after Hadley, or will he drop it and remember this incident as something random and turn Hadley into some girl he once met on a plane? While fate did its work to bring them together when all doors seemed to be closed, it is eventually on them to choose each other, to decide whether this is the love they want and if they are willing to work on it to be with each other for the rest of their lives. Luckily, Oliver chooses to go after Hadley, and when he shows up at her door, she decides to give him a chance. The narrator reveals that the couple spent years with each other, and despite the arguments and differences, they continued to choose each other for the rest of their lives.
