Our review of ‘7 Days’ was first published as part of our Tribeca Film Festival 2021 coverage.

Where to watch: Now playing in select theaters. In Los Angeles at the AMC & Alamo Drafthouse Downtown.

Making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival 2021, 7 Days is a feel-good, charming and heartfelt rom-com that perfectly captures this modern moment. It’s a pretty conventional rom-com set-up that we’ve seen before: two young people go on an awkward first date, and when forces greater than them trap them together, must endure each other for much longer than anticipated.

But 7 Days adds to that simple setup. The film’s writers–director Roshan Sethi, and one half of the film’s stars’ Karan Soni–give 7 Days its unique voice by crafting the central premise around experiences they both know well: the pressure felt by young Indian-Americans from their traditional parents to find their future spouses.

We soon find that Ravi (Karan Soni) and Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan), pleasant as they are in person, don’t exactly attract. The comedy comes quickly once they find themselves trapped together by COVID’s shelter in place orders (the film was shot during the pandemic as well), and it’s here where we find that there are some discrepancies in who their parents promoted them to be on their date.

Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) turns out to be less than traditionally conforming, cracking a morning beer and stowing away to talk to her “daddy” while carelessly leaving her vibrator lying around the house. This shocks the straight-laced and more traditionally-minded Ravi (Karan Soni), on track for medical school and startled to see Rita’s true colors.

Between the laughably awkward moments and reveals that Ravi and Rita experience together, 7 Days makes for a very funny time. Geraldine Vaswanathan adds her effortless appeal here, but it’s Karan Soni who, as the hilariously effeminate and uptight Ravi, earns most of the laughs, each new reveal eeking out a quietly terrified reaction.

Past the cute setup, 7 Days takes on the more grim reality of COVID (impressively, director Roshan Sethi is also a doctor), and we are given a deeper emotional story than before. It’s here when real life health concerns force Ravi and Rita to acknowledge the larger parts about their lives, with their anxieties about getting older and the pressure of finding their future spouses.

Although it all takes place in a single room, the film presents a much bigger scope of life and explore’s how the world’s bigger than ourselves. The single location does present a limited vision then what you might be familiar with, but it’s also what allows the actors to be so comfortable. And it’s so well-paced that it doesn’t feel limited, exploring little moments like cooking food together and getting drunk in fun ways.

There’s definitely not as much cinematic bravado as say, Netflix’s Malcom & Marie, a much more self-serious and technically deliberate look at dating and exploring space within a single location. But here, watching Ravi and Rita is like hanging out with fun and affable friends, and the relaxed writing and performances all adds to the film’s simple charms.

To these ends, 7 Days is impactful because of its accurate look at young people’s mindsets, of which looking for love, completion and the future are all so present. It’s also impactful because they track COVID’s deadly progression along with the meet-cute story, which is a strange layer of reality to see so soon following the very real pandemic.

And yet, 7 Days remains a fun, easy-to-watch romantic comedy that’s straight up funny, going for every laugh it goes for, before becoming a sincere and heartfelt story on relationships in the age of a pandemic. It also leaves you wondering, how am I going to live after COVID? Who will I choose to be, and who will I choose to love? Will I choose to play things more traditional and safe, or dare for something more in this new world full of possibilities?

86 min.