Scenes From A Situationship: Vaibhav Munjal Captures A Nonlinear Portrait Of Modern Love
In ‘Scenes from a Situationship’, filmmaker Vaibhav Munjal turns the most emotionally ambiguous relationship of the 2020s into a tender, talk-driven romance. Through the push-and-pull dynamic between Udit, a yearning YouTuber, and Tanisha, a commitment-averse marketing professional, the film captures how modern love survives on emotional ambiguity, the absence of labels, and the hope that clarity will arrive without being asked for.
He is an aspiring YouTuber. She is a young marketing professional. He’s a yearner. She’s a free spirit. He wants the security of labels. She wants to explore more.
When we first meet the protagonists of filmmaker Vaibhav Munjal’s first full-length feature, ‘Scenes from a Situationship’, Udit (Vaishnav Vyas) is looking for “someone to get bored with”, and Tanisha (Shreya Shandilya) is still recovering from her last “toxic” relationship. Over the next one hour and twenty-seven minutes, we see the ebb and tide of this situationship as they pull and push each other. An intimate, conversational, deceptively modest indie film that calls back to the glory days of conversational rom-coms like Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy (1995-2013), Marc Webb’s ‘500 Days of Summer’ (2009), and Sam Esmail’s ‘Comet’ (2014), ‘Scenes from a Situationship’ understands something many mainstream Indian romance films of recent vintage seem to miss completely: that the most emotionally consequential relationships of the modern era often unfold without grand declarations, end goals, or labels.
Structured as a series of loosely connected, non-linear vignettes, the film follows Udit and Tanisha as they drift into, through, and around each other in what can be best described as a prolonged emotional holding pattern. Between them there is intimacy, humour, resentment, tenderness, tension, sex, withdrawal, and reconciliation, but no real progress. Munjal’s choice to avoid a conventional narrative arc mirrors the internal logic of the situationship itself — its cyclical, unresolved, and strangely addictive nature that makes it the definitive romantic relationship of the 2020s.
What Munjal captures here, with unsentimental precision, is the tension that defines the situationship as a romantic form. This is not love delayed so much as love deferred indefinitely — sustained through constant negotiation, implied promises, and the hope that clarity will eventually arrive without being asked for. Udit wants the definition and security of labels; Tanisha wants openness. Neither position is antagonistic, but the mismatch in their expectations creates a tense undercurrent that never quite dissipates. Their conversations circle the same questions again and again, as if this act of repetition itself might produce some semblance of resolution.
Munjal is particularly perceptive about how language — or the refusal of it — structures power in modern relationships. The need for or aversion to labels and definitions becomes a site of conflict, not only because they are inherently restrictive, but because they expose asymmetries of desire. The person who asks for clarity risks appearing needy; the person who avoids it gets to define the terms of engagement by default. Seen in this context, ‘Scenes from a Situationship’ functions as a social document of 2020s romantic entanglements — shaped by dating apps, therapy-speak, and an ideology of emotional autonomy that often masks fear of commitment, which is also, in many ways, the fear of rejection.
Formally, the film leans into conversational realism. Much of it unfolds in bedrooms, living rooms, and cafes — in liminal, semi-private spaces where contemporary relationships are negotiated in unresolved fragments rather than set-piece romantic proclamations. Here, too, Munjal resists the urge to moralise. The film does not “resolve” Udit and Tanisha’s situationship or punish either character for their choices. Instead, it recognises the situational mode of romantic entanglement as symptomatic of a broader cultural moment: one defined by uncertainty, delayed adulthood, and the fear of missing out more. After all, the situationship thrives in the modern world precisely because the modern world has reduced forever to a false promise.
At its weakest, ‘Scenes from a Situationship’ slips into the naïveté of a hallmark romance, with awkward pacing and stretches of unnatural dialogue that stand out precisely because of how conversational it otherwise is. But at its best, it reminds one of the sweet nostalgia of a time when rom-coms still had the power to make us believe in love, if only for an hour and a half.
Watch the film here.
