Geraldine Viswanathan and Karan Soni in a scene from “7 Days,” screening online for this year’s BendFilm Festival.

There will probably be a lot of pandemic-related storylines in the future and they’re bound to become very old very quickly. In all honesty, I feel like we could skip over the whole sub-genre and be totally fine. Which is why I was so surprised to find myself loving “7 Days,” screening virtually at this year’s BendFilm Festival.

Is it the most earth-shatteringly original rom-com ever to be released? No. It’s not sweepingly romantic either, but it feels very honest with what it is, and that alone is noteworthy.

The Duplass Brothers-produced film starts with a “When Harry Met Sally” style Zoom interview with various Indian couples, where they tell their own individual stories of how they met, the majority of them being set up by their parents or other family members, with the couple deciding to marry relatively quickly.

We then meet Ravi (Karan Soni, who also co-wrote the film) and Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) through their online profiles on a dating site with the tagline “Find a soulmate … for your Indian child.” Yes, their parents set up the profiles to hopefully snag their kids a partner.

Both profiles indicate that the potential matches are traditional, non-drinkers, vegetarians, and looking forward to a match with an equally traditional person.

When Ravi and Rita do meet, it’s March 2020. Their date at the local reservoir, which has dried up, is as awkward as a normal first date would be, with Rita sounding pleasantly supportive of Ravi and his thrown together picnic, while he rambles and sweats under his mask. Then their phones begin exploding with notifications that COVID has officially been named a pandemic and stay-at-home orders are being placed.

With Ravi unable to secure a rental car to get himself home, Rita invites him to stay the night on her couch until he’s able to find something. When they arrive at her house, it’s clear that Rita hasn’t been completely honest. It’s revealed that she’s everything but traditional, from her affair with a married man to her cleaning skills, which are highly lacking. The only reason she was on the dating/marriage site was to appease her mother, and she has no intentions of ever getting married. The next morning, Ravi finds out that there are no rentals available for the next two days and with no hotel open due to the shelter-in-place orders, he and Rita must stay put together.

There are a couple of moments in the film when it seems like the chronology is off a little bit, but the distraction of trying to figure out how long they’ve been cooped up doesn’t last long because the story is as good as it is. And there are some interesting and touching moments, and then there are some that aren’t super necessary, but do help with character development, in a way.

The slow build of loathing to loving that Ravi and Rita go through is classic rom-com territory, but when you confine it to a one-bedroom house somewhere in California, it’s more subdued but no less funny. Many of their hang-ups, they realize, come from, in Ravi’s case, letting go of some of the strict rules he and his mother had when it came to his life and to love, and in Rita’s case, letting someone else into her life and allowing them to see her vulnerabilities and flaws, regardless of what the outcome would be.

Soni and Roshan Sethi’s (who also directed) script is lightly funny and warm while still able to dip into the deeper, more tragic topics — after all, it takes place during a global pandemic — without compromising the story at hand.

“7 Days”

86 minutes

No MPA rating

3 stars