I’ve seen a lot of rom-coms – The Holiday. You’ve Got Mail. 27 Dresses. But let’s be real: most of these films feature white leads, if not an entirely white cast, as if only white people fall in love. That’s why I was so excited to see Amazon Prime’s Picture This, a new rom-com based on the Australian film Five Blind Dates starring – and executive produced by – Indian British actress Simone Ashley of Bridgerton fame. She plays Pia, a photographer in London who is serving as the maid of honor at her sister’s wedding when a spiritual guru informs her that she will meet the love of her life within her next five dates. But things get complicated when Charlie, the best man – and her first love – reenters the picture.

With such an effortlessly funny, sincere, and beautiful actress like Ashley at the story’s center, the film certainly has its charms. Her character Pia is confident and stubborn, determined to build a life on her own terms, without needing a man to complete her. She’s passionate about her work as a photographer, capturing the best in every client who steps in front of her lens. She’s a bit of a mess, downright clumsy at times, which I found silly but relatable. At the same time, she comes across as cool and collected on all of her dates, most of which seem to go well until they open their mouths – which, if we’re honest, is not that far from real life.

She also has an incredible dynamic with her mother Laxmi (Sindhu Vee) and younger sister Sonal (Anoushka Chadha), who deliver some of the film’s most laugh-out-loud moments.

Together, the three women light up every scene they’re in, creating pure comedic chaos – literally pulling each other’s hair, arguing and disagreeing, calling each other out – yet ultimately choosing to fiercely love and build each other up.

They’re the best parts of a movie that carries so much earnestness but often falls flat with clichés. Pia has the ever-familiar gay best friend Jay (Luke Fetherston), who seems to have no life of his own outside of orbiting Pia and reacting to her romantic escapades. He’s just there without any plotline of his own, which honestly would have beefed up both the queer representation and Pia’s larger storyline in the script.

I also wasn’t quite sure what to make of Pia’s opposition to marriage, even if it is a familiar trope for fiercely independent leading women. On one hand, I can understand her poor outlook on the institution. She’s right in that marriage is, at best, a legally binding contract and, at worst, a barrier to being able to get what you really want in life, like work you love outside of the domestic sphere. In her mind, a career and love/marriage can’t co-exist, especially not for her. But Pia never really explains why she believes this, and honestly, I didn’t buy it – especially since I could already predict how the plot would unfold.

There is a case to be made that she’s still hurting from her break-up with Charlie, who seemed to give her the ultimatum between her dream career and her relationship with him. But even that isn’t quite what it seems, nor was Charlie’s recollection of it when they have a heart-to-heart later in the film. So instead of being genuine, Pia ends up sounding like a tired, familiar echo of every jaded leading lady before her who swears off love and doesn’t know she’s in a rom-com. Before the twenty-first century, women really did live in a society that forced them to choose between love, family, and home, or passion, career, and success. It’s how we got movies like Baby Boom, a relic of the Reagan era that made women wonder if they really could “have it all,” a concept that comedically only applies to women.

But in 2025, that’s not as true as it once was. And besides her mother urging her to get married – which she lets go of at the end – Pia is not facing the stakes of those choices. And in her effort to be progressive and forward-thinking, she ends up sounding outdated in a culture whose ideas around marriage are slowly shifting. We’re in an era of romanticism and sincerity. Many of us want to be in love. Marriage and divorce aren’t as difficult to initiate anymore. Can romance be a distraction? Can men make unrealistic demands of you and the outcome of your life? Absolutely. But that’s not really what’s happening here, which makes Pia’s resistance feel more like a forced cliché rather than a real dilemma.

I do appreciate, however, how much heart there is in the film – most of it due to its majority-WOC team. The three female leads are all played by women of Indian descent, one of whom executive produced it, and it was also directed and written by women of Indian descent. In an industry where women of color – especially South Asian women – rarely get to control their own narratives, that is no small feat.

It’s worth noting, of course, that when there are rom-coms featuring South Asians – like The Lovebirds and The Broken Hearts Gallery – but they’re not written or directed by South Asians. It’s representation but not as authentic as it could be, unlike Bride and Prejudice or India Sweets and Spices that center Indian women in their casts, directing, and writing.

And that’s exactly why I want more. More stories for us, by us, and about us – where we’re not just the love interest, the sidekick, or the trope, but the ones shaping the narrative from start to finish. Watching Simone Ashley on-screen in Bridgerton and now Picture This, it’s clear that she is carving out a space for herself in an industry that would prefer to underutilize her immense talent and potential. She’s stunning, she commands the screen, and she can say more with one look than most can with an entire monologue. She deserves all the success of her white colleagues and more. Hopefully, this is just the beginning, and we’ll see her leading even bigger and better projects in the future.