Delayed Reaction: 7 Days

Premise: After an awkward first date, two Indian-Americans get stuck together in COVID quarantine for a week.

 

COVID-19 is going to be my new 2008 WGA strike. The tail of discrete impacts of the WGA strike has fascinated me for over a decade. I love piecing together what film productions were rushed to have a script ready before the strike. I love tracking the trajectory of TV shows that thrived or wilted because of the halt. There’s this weird pop culture hole that can be felt in so many ways. COVID is going to be like that too. Obviously there are the people who died from it and the world shutting down for a while. That trickles down to the theatrical disruption and the acceleration of the streaming shift. And from that is the shift in how films actually get made. And that’s where 7 Days comes in.

 

It turns out, COVID is too good of a premise for filmmakers to resist. It makes sense. It’s a truly worldwide event that drastically affected how people lived their lives. For indie filmmakers in particular it’s especially appealing. Minimal cast. Minimal locations. Believable high-concept scenario. Think about it. In 2019, how hard would it be to create a scenario where two people are stuck in a house together for a week? Half the movie would be spent setting up how the car broke and the cell phone died and there’s a convention in town and any number of other excuses. Instead, a movie like 7 Days just has to say COVID and that’s it.

 

7 Days had me early and lost me late. I’m a huge Geraldine Viswanathan fan and have liked Karan Soni in a number of things too. The odd couple-pairing is great. I love the specificity of the Indian-American experience with the characters negotiating a balance between the old ways and modern times. I don’t think Viswanathan and Soni make any sense as a couple – great friend chemistry, not romantic – but I can accept the movie going in the RomCom direction. The movie lost me as soon as Viswanathan got COVID. It was an extra complication the movie really didn’t need. More importantly, it took Viswanathan out of the film for most of the third act. By simple math, when a movie is a two-hander and you take away one of the hands, the film suffers significantly.

 

The film really doesn’t know how to broach the COVID discussion. It doesn’t know how scared the characters should be. It can’t quite capture how little anyone knew. It has to battle with hindsight, and, knowing what we know now, Viswanathan getting severe COVID feels like a stretch. There just weren’t that many mid-20s people getting hit that bad. Obviously, Koni’s character doesn’t know that she’ll be fine. In my mind though, I’m just thinking “give her a couple days and some hydration and she’ll be 100% fine”. Given that COVID was just an excuse for the forced housemates premise, I don’t know why they needed to add actual COVID to the movie.

As a RomCom, 7 Days is fine. As a hang-out comedy, 7 Days is pretty good. As a COVID movie, 7 Days has a lot of problems. In balance, I still liked the movie, but there’s a huge chunk of the movie that’s a complete waste of time.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend