Simone Ashley shines in this bland rom-com
Picture This (2025) must be the best in terms of the set up of a rom-com. Simone Ashley features as Pia, a photographer trying to sustain her portrait business in London. She is told by a guru that the love of her life will be met in the next five dates. It’s engaging, it’s classic, and the built-in countdown hints at a great ending. The five dates revolve around the promise of a wide range of comedic situations and romantic insights.
You also have the real romance, the reconnection with Pia and her high school sweetheart Charlie (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), whom she broke up with after going off to university in London. And this happens while Pia’s sister is getting married, and the two leads are the best man and maid of honour.
A big fat Indian wedding, a five-date countdown, and a romance that comes back to the one who got away? This was supposed to be an amazing movie, but it stumbles in the execution.
In Picture This, many themes and elements are combined, and some are quite fascinating! For instance, there is Pia’s love for photography and her struggle to keep the portraiture shop open without offering passport photo services which leads to fierce competition.
Pia’s mother’s family heirlooms are another angle which will never be parted with until her daughter is married. There is also an artsy younger sister, Pia, who is anti-marriage and clashes with her older sister, Sonal, who married her childhood friend and became the ideal suburban wife.
Regardless, the film chooses not to commit to any of these plotlines and gives a shallow treatment to each of them in sequence. Pair this with the perfectly mediocre, utterly unromantic, and uninspired blind dates, and you have a narrative that doesn’t even seem to understand what it’s trying to say. It feels like the mood is inconsistent, there is chaotic editing, many scenes are disjointed, and some lines delivered seem to be too unrealistic for everyday conversation.
For me, the biggest crime of “Picture This” is the absence of romance. Particularly in a romantic comedy, the main couple, Pia and Charlie, hardly get any screen time together! They reconnect over fragmented conversations, cursory remarks, and one distinctly emotional car ride during which they ‘work through’ their separation. Whatever appeal Hero Fiennes Tiffin exudes is not visible here.
We are repeatedly told that Pia and Charlie were together in school, but we have no access to them as a couple. How did they get into a relationship? What did they find so appealing in one another? What kind of outings did they go on? The film appears to be uninterested in such matters, both in the retrospective and in the current timeline.
As Charlie tells Pia that she still crosses his mind, we never really get an insight into what exactly it is that he longs for. We get a glimpse of them briefly discussing the breakup, but aside from that, we are left with a blank slate regarding the couple’s relationship, apart from the fact that love once existed. Where’s the deep love story here?
The silver lining of all of this is Simone Ashley, who breathes life into Pia, even if there isn’t much to work with. She gives Pia a form of clumsiness where she loses a slipper while bus-catching and unintentionally bumps into people, as well as a certain awkwardness that stems from defending the right cause, but doing so in a very loud, possibly obnoxious way.
Ashley brings to life a character who comes off as chaotic yet fiercely empathetic. Pia’s downfall, however, is that she gets no attention in an underdeveloped film that features a weak plot centered around lackluster romance, dull comedy, and little to no depth.
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