Mark Reviews Movies: 7 DAYS

7 Days, Cinedigm

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 24, 2022

It'll be a bit before we stop getting movies inspired by and made during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the measures taken to lessen the disease's impact. 7 Days is a familiar (already, somehow) but heartwarming example of exactly the type of movie similar ones have been and inevitable ones in the future surely will be.

It's about two very different people stuck in the same space once a shelter-in-place order has been announced. The gimmick is that these two people have just met on a very awkward first date. It would have been the last time they saw each other, too, if not for, you know, the pandemic.

Ravi (Karan Soni) and Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) are only on the date at the start of the story on account of their mothers. They come from Indian families, and each one's mother has set up an online dating profile (ones on multiple sites, actually) for her adult child, hoping to find a spouse in a modern-day variation of an arranged marriage.

Ravi is in town on a business trip, and when the pair's date—what should be a riverside picnic but is just an insect-infested meeting on a patch of dried-up dirt—is over, he discovers that the trains have been canceled. It'll take a day—and then a couple more—before he can rent a car, too, so Ravi will have to stay with Rita until then.

He is conservative, a teetotaler and vegetarian, and set in his future plans for marriage and a family (He wants three kids but will settle for two). On the date, Rita seems that way, too, but upon returning to her secluded ranch house, it turns out that she drinks booze, eats meat, is having an affair with a married man, and only goes on these dates to keep her mother happy and in the dark about her life.

The setup of Soni and director Roshan Sethi's screenplay is simple, straightforward, and quite funny. Most of the resulting humor is in the differences between these two characters and the various little conflicts that result. Ravi is too uptight and closed off to new experiences—even watching movies that aren't from Bollywood—to be fun company, and Rita is far too messy and spontaneous for her polar opposite. Even so, the real core of the story and this relationship is in how, over the course of their days trapped together, each character slowly and subtly breaks down the barriers of and learns from the other.

Soni and Viswanathan are equally but distinctly charming in these roles, and the evolving chemistry between the two actors does a lot of heavy but rewarding lifting. If the film's sudden turn toward the reality of the world beyond the house feels uncharacteristically grave and bordering on exploitative, 7 Days has established enough goodwill to ignore or forgive those concerns.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products