Prarthana Menon’s directorial “Picture This” (2025) is a remake of the Australian film “Five Blind Dates” sans any visual wit, inventiveness or inspired touches. Keep expectations as low as possible before stepping in. Ideally, a remake should extend the conversation the original began, devise a sparkling new direction, and add fresh innovative touches. What even would be the purpose of mounting a new adaptation of the same narrative? Clearly, these questions weren’t on the minds of this film’s makers, delivering something spectacularly shoddy even in basic adherence to the originary material.
Where’s the fun, the romance and charm? All these are in grievous short supply as the film puts the reliable Simone Ashley through a string of contrived situations, trapped in the most stilted dialogue. But when the original itself was so dull and terribly stage-managed in every aspect, how much can the remake salvage? It’s stacked with tired tropes that can leap off the ground, neither of them striking or splendid in inspired, clever ways. It’s a shame because Ashley deserves better than being saddled with rendering a bagful of cliches interesting and worth investing in.
Picture This (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Pia’s Unexpected Quest for Love
Pia (Simone Ashley), a second-generation NRI, is struggling to keep her analog photo studio running. Debt has been mounting. Along with her ‘gay bestie’ Jay (Luke Fetherston), she tries to keep it afloat, but circumstances indicate it is headed for sinking soon. On top of financial uncertainties, which she keeps hidden from her family, telling them instead it’s perfectly fine. Her mother insists that she get married and take the question of finding a partner with due seriousness. Pia can’t be less bothered. But when her sister Sonal’s engagement interrupts, the pursuit of a partner gains new urgency.
The astrologer tells Pia that any of her next five dates will be her soulmate. She laughs it off. However, her family takes it very seriously and follows through with plans of their own and devising dates that Pia can be on. Of course, there’s much amusement and disaster to be mined from the slew of situations that emerge and you’re taken through them in due course.
Is Pia’s True Love Written in the Stars—or in Her Past?
Up first is a Bombay bigwig, who Pia’s father sets her up with. He proposes a marriage of convenience. He will support her business and she can be his official partner to show up at events while he pursues dalliances in covert. The situation is an instant no-no from Pia. Then there’s Akshay, who is set up by Pia’s mother, a junior at her workplace. An allergy attack at the park where the two meet leads to a realization that it’s actually her mother, Akshay is drawn to, and she too is. Next is the date orchestrated by Sonal. A yoga trainer who initially charms Pia. But when she realizes the degree of his delusion, his archaic beliefs, she immediately removes herself from any follow-up situation.
What Pia can’t keep her mind off is the lingering question of her childhood sweetheart, Charlie (Hero Fiennes Tiffin). They were meant to be together. They’d promised each other but reality had cruelly intervened, circumstances jumping in. Charlie stuck back in the hometown, not joining college, which she did. She felt it was a betrayal. He insisted he had to be there for his family, they needed him to put things back in order. The film rests on the two’s mutual admission of profound love, outlasting the vagaries of circumstances. There’s a gradual awakening of each other’s importance.
Picture This (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Do Pia and Charlie get back together?
Pia’s store is almost on its spindly last legs when it gets a dramatic resurgence thanks to a passionate speech she makes that becomes a trending sensation. Droves swell in. Business gets a reboost. There are deals booked for the next three months. Pia is hurtful towards her sister. But gradually comes round to accepting her mistakes, her bouts of selfish, misled anger. It takes the gentle insistence of Jay, who presents himself as her best, platonic date, to put things for her in perspective, be grateful for the people she has in her life and lean on them for love and support instead of receding.
She turns up at the wedding, where the sisters patch up. Pia urges her mother to pursue the romance with Akshay, which she was baulking at. She too tells Pia that she should invest the savings in her name, meant for her wedding, into business. Finally, an ecstatic, relieved Pia confronts Charlie and confesses she still loves him as deeply and sincerely as she did before they parted ways. He too reiterates the same and the two have a happily ever after ending, wrapped in the joy of Sonal’s wedding.
Picture This (2025) Movie Review:
How much can Ashley alone prop up a failed enterprise as this, which just seems to cash in on the original’s popularity? The dearth of fresh, saucy ideas is further exacerbated by the assembly-line finish to the remake, each passing minor player coming off as planted, inorganic, a mere appendage than having their own personality. It’s as if the film is wrestling to comb strands towards a compelling, satisfying and fun conclusion. The rest of it is a scattered bunch of disparate scenes that hews towards ridiculousness, silliness accelerating and logic checking out. “Picture This” is too patchy to cohere into something winsome or endearing.
For starters, even the conceit of five dates isn’t etched out with enough flair or spark. You are left constantly wondering, puzzled, why the cast signed up, how the generic puddle of culturally stale touchpoints got through and was greenlit. The film is bizarrely underdeveloped, struggling to crackle and rise above inertness despite a heaving dramatic pulse. The screenplay by Nikita Lalwani rushes through the situations with such eagerness and urgency, it tramples solid character development of the defining romantic interest, let alone the flickering dates. Hence, the ultimate, central love story between Pia and Charlie fails to ring through with any passion and sweetness.
