Ek Din Review | Junaid Khan-Sai Pallavi's Latest Has An Intriguing Premise Undone By Vanilla Storytelling

It’s no secret that many are yearning for a return to the heady days, where swooning Bollywood romances arrived in theatres every other week. The success of Saiyaara (2025) was a necessary shot in the arm for Bollywood producers because of its conviction in telling an intense love story that also somehow resisted succumbing to violence as a shortcut for dramatic tension. Sunil Pandey’s Ek Din, which also happens to employ memory loss as a plot device, attempts to reach for the same effect. However, as the relative lack of pre-release excitement around the film would perhaps tell you, this film is no Saiyaara.

Ek Din, which is a remake of the Thai film One Day (2016), is a largely faithful retelling of the story of a shy IT guy Dino (Junaid Khan), who pines for his spunky colleague Meera (Sai Pallavi), who in turn is in a relationship with her boss Nakul (Kunal Kapoor). During an office trip to Japan, Dino visits an ancient temple and wishes for just a single day which he could spend with Meera as her boyfriend. Meera meets with an accident and develops Transient Global Amnesia (TAG), wherein while she is in Japan, she loses her short-term memory, which is bound to return to her after one day. In this one day, Dino tries to live his fantasy of being romantically involved with Meera by pretending to be her boyfriend.

Let’s get this out of the way first—Ek Din is not a bad film. It is a well-shot, mostly well-acted film that sometimes even flirts with being a breezy romance. This makes it an easy watch, preferably in winters curled up under a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate. It’s designed to provide comfort, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the intention, the plot device at the centre—which involves a man manipulating a woman’s medical condition to fulfil his own fantasy—is one that does not lend itself easily to comfort viewing. The film therefore suffers from an identity crisis where the inherent danger of Dino’s decision, which should ideally animate the drama in the film, is consistently undermined by the film’s decision to make Dino a saintly figure. So, yes, he lies and there are consequences to his actions, but his actions through the fateful day are so vanilla that it begs the question: why even go through this charade in the first place?

What makes the film watchable, though, are the individual sequences where Dino’s awkwardness comes to the fore and brings some much-needed levity to his conversations with Meera. Khan’s performance deserves some praise as he plays to his strengths. His hunched posture and stilted body movements project underconfidence, even when he is stealing glances here and there. It is good to see him holding forth in the film after his disastrous previous outing with Loveyapa (2025). Sai Pallavi, on the other hand, does the heavy lifting in the dramatic sequences, although her character is written as one that responds to situations rather than activate them—her entire screentime revolving around the actions of two men who both manipulate her in their own ways. Kunal Kapoor as Nakul, her married boyfriend and boss, is criminally underused as the film progresses and he recedes into the background. The central problem, however, remains a confusion about the tone of the film. It is neither a romantic comedy nor a dark romance, or even a travel film per se. The overuse of the soaring background score doesn’t help either, which force fits high emotionality into sequences that probably deserve a quieter soundscape. Proclamations of falling in love in a single day feel unearned as a result, if not unintentionally comical.

What works best for the film is Ram Sampath’s soundtrack, with a brief moment of Sai Pallavi lip syncing Meghna Mishra’s version of the title track standing out as a bright spark of the film this could have been. Arijit Singh’s version of the title track and “Khwaab Dekhoon” are both excellent compositions that elevate the sequences they are scored to. The film’s setting in Sapporo, Japan is also somewhat unique, as it is not just a scenic backdrop but a dynamic environment that regularly contributes to the movement of the story for these characters. The music and Manoj Lobo’s camerawork keep things watchable, even pleasant sometimes. However, Ek Din, almost as an overreaction to displays of hypermasculinity on screen these days, wants to make Dino appear absolutely harmless, which sucks out any complexity in these characters’ circumstances. The film, thus, fails to outline its identity or ambition clearly. In a way, Ek Din is almost content to play second fiddle to the great tradition of Bollywood romances that have raised the stakes by the deployment of memory loss as a plot device.