They say that the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. "One Day" is all about that need, and how two people (subconsciously and otherwise) hold on to that for 23 long years.
Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) are college friends who almost sleep together on graduation day at a college in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1988. They instead decide to be best friends, and to make that day — July 15 — their personal anniversary date. For the next two decades and three years, Emma and Dexter sometimes meet up on their anniversary and sometimes don't, and the film slides from one July 15 to another, stringing vignettes of Emma and Dexter's lives like differing beads on a single necklace.
Does it work? That's kind of hard to say. You see, Emma and Dexter are so brilliantly attractive and obviously attracted to each other that this anniversary thing feels uncomfortably gimmicky. I mean, what kind of guy goes to bed with Anne Hathaway, then calls it quits and decides to be friends instead? Psychoanalysis aside, I can give it to you in one word: knucklehead. It's enough to make you want to want to give up on the Emma-Dexter couple altogether and wish Emma would take up with someone else immediately.