Lone Scherfig’s One Day Turns 15, Still Can’t Decide If It’s a Romance or a Time-Lapse

The tagline for One Day promises “Twenty years. Two people.” What the film delivers is 107 minutes of two people who mostly should not be in the same room, and a structure that keeps insisting they should.

Lone Scherfig directs from David Nicholls’ screenplay, adapted from his own 2009 novel. Anne Hathaway plays Emma Morley and Jim Sturgess plays Dexter Mayhew. They meet on 15 July 1988, the eve of their graduation from the University of Edinburgh, and spend a platonic night together agreeing to “just be friends.” The film then checks in on them every 15 July for 20 years.

Trailer, via Universal Pictures UK.

St. Swithin’s Day, Every Year

The mechanic is the whole movie, so here is the running order as the plot lays it out:

That table is not a simplification. It is close to the experience of watching the film.

A Gimmick That Keeps Its Distance

The annual check-in is a clever idea for a book, where a chapter can carry a year’s worth of interior life. On screen it works against the two actors. We get one day, then a jump, then another day. Whatever happened in between — the jobs, the relationships, the decisions that made these people who they are — is skipped. The audience is asked to feel 20 years of intimacy from a handful of scenes.

Hathaway and Sturgess are both capable, and neither is the problem. The problem is that Emma and Dexter are not interesting enough on any single 15 July to justify the wait for the next one. He is a wealthy, privately educated television presenter who gets high on cocaine and insults his best friend at dinner. She is a working-class would-be writer from the north of England who settles for a man she has no chemistry with.

Dexter, Emma, and the Shaw Line

The film’s ugliest scene arrives on 15 July 1996. Dexter, high on cocaine, flirts with another woman and quotes George Bernard Shaw at Emma: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” She storms off and tells him they have outgrown each other. She says she loves him but no longer likes him.

That should land. It is the one moment where the film’s central relationship is allowed to be genuinely bad rather than wistfully sad. But the movie has spent eight years telling us these two belong together, and it has not earned the reversal. The line reads as a plot beat, not a betrayal.

Patricia Clarkson and Ken Stott appear as Dexter’s parents, and Clarkson gets the film’s sharpest material. After Dexter arrives at his parents’ house still drunk, his mother — who has a terminal cancer diagnosis — tells him he is not yet a nice person. It is a real observation about a real character, delivered with no sentiment. The film could have used more of that.

What the Twenty Years Add Up To

One Day was released in the United States on 19 August 2011 by Focus Features and in the United Kingdom on 24 August 2011 by Universal Pictures. A Netflix series adaptation of the same novel, with Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall, arrived in 2024.

The comparison is not flattering to the film. A series has the room to let a year breathe. A 107-minute feature does not, and Scherfig’s version never solves that problem. It compresses the novel’s structure without finding a visual or dramatic equivalent for what the book did on the page.

There is a version of this story that works. Two people, one date, two decades — the premise is sound, and the casting is not the failure. The failure is that One Day keeps telling us time has passed instead of showing us what it cost. We are handed a table of years and asked to supply the feeling ourselves.

The film’s best scene is a mother telling her son the truth. The rest is a calendar with a love story stapled to it.

Anne Hathaway · David Nicholls · Jim Sturgess · Lone Scherfig · movie review · One Day