Love happens. A marriage can be arranged. Can love be arranged too? The Netflix original film Ginny Weds Sunny proposes that murmurs of the heart can be converted into “I dos” with the right amount of parental nudging.

Mums and dads play an outsized role in Puneet Khanna’s movie, written by Navjot Gulati and Sumit Arora. Yami Gautam is Ginny, the romantically confused woman of yore. She still has feelings for her feckless ex, Nishant (Suhail Nayyar), and is impervious to her professional matchmaker mother’s pleas to find a groom. Vikrant Massey is Sunny, who dreams of owning a restaurant and is prepared to get married for it – especially since his father (Rajiv Gupta) has promised to foot the bill if he ties the knot.

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Ginny’s mother (Ayesha Raza) and Sunny’s father scheme to bring their wards together. The desperate-to-be-hitched Sunny is introduced into Ginny’s orbit. Fortunately for him and the movie, he is smitten. Sunny piles on to Ginny for a bit, and she seems to be getting used to him, the way one does, say, to working from home or wearing a mask.

Consent may be manufactured. So may love, per Ginny Weds Sunny. It’s going according to Mummy-Daddy’s grand plan until Nishant returns with a proposal and a ring. Ginny is mildly torn, Sunny dredges up some anger and they carry on in this way until the end credits.

The dull inevitability of a relationship ordered and steered by family members precludes the possibility of a romance based on genuine feeling. The 125-minute movie closely follows the advice of Ginny’s mother to Sunny: just get used to her and love will follow.

But it doesn’t. Yami Gautam and Vikrant Massey dutifully play the yes-no-maybe game and are perfectly decent in their respective roles, but they struggle to get a fire going. Ayesha Raza huffs and puffs away as Ginny’s overthinking mother, while Suhail Nayyar looks suitably perplexed as the on-now-off-tomorrow element in Ginny’s life.