With red carpets being unrolled and designer gowns undergoing last-minute fittings as attention focuses on this weekend’s Academy Awards, an off-center and very funny movie has snuck into theaters.

In the tradition of “It Happened One Night,” “Pillow Talk,” and the rom-com of your choice, “7 Days” iterates a distinct set of expectations: the “meet cute”; the incompatible personalities; the extenuating circumstance that throws the two together; the realization that first impressions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be; and, yup, love, sweet love. Or something resembling it, anyway.

How does director Roshan Sethi, who co-wrote the script with Karan Soni, the film’s male lead, elaborate on this formula? The answer is culture and the coronavirus.

Ravi is a 20-something researcher at an unnamed California university, a man who “likes his job so much [that] he has no hobbies by choice.” Rita (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a young woman of “strict moral values” who does, in fact, have a hobby: “caring for her future in-laws.” These descriptions come courtesy of their respective mothers, each of whom logs onto a website that promises to “find a soulmate … for your Indian child.”

Overbearing mothers and pre-arranged marriages? Tech-obsessed geekery? Snarky asides about subservient women, Bollywood, and just how hot and dirty India might be? Messrs. Sethi and Soni are wise to a basic tenet of comedy: Cultural traits are to be acknowledged and indulged even as they are tweaked and undermined. It worked for Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, and Nia Vardalos. Why not these two gentlemen?

Ravi and Rita have their first date — a picnic arranged by their mothers — in a reservoir bereft not only of water but of romance. A disastrous outing is interrupted by a spate of disastrous texts: the WHO declares a world-wide pandemic, the governor institutes shelter-in-place directives, and Ravi’s rental car is indefinitely postponed. Welcome, Covid.

What are two ill-suited singles to do? Habitate together, uncomfortably. Rita’s home is situated nearby, and it’s there that we learn her moral values are more elastic than advertised. The place is a dump: thick with grime, rife with empty beer bottles, and decorated with low-rent cowboy memorabilia. There’s fried chicken in the fridge and a vibrator on the bathroom sink. Ravi, the strict vegetarian and unapologetic Mama’s Boy, is aghast.

What commences is a laugh-out-loud run of set-pieces that underline the travails of assimilation, the limits of tradition, and the pitfalls of attraction. The comedy stops — or, rather, deepens – when Rita comes down with a fever and a cough. She’s rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with Covid.

Mr. Sethi brings experience as a resident physician to “7 Days,” having spent close to two months during early 2020 working in Covid wards. Messrs. Sethi and Soni subsequently knocked out a draft of the script in five days. Filming finished in eight days with a crew whose members had never before set eyes on each other.

All of which bears mentioning because “7 Days” is a remarkably fluid film — not a rush job by any stretch of the imagination. Mr. Sethi is aided by his director of photography, Jeremy Mackie, who brings a documentary flair to the proceedings, overlaying realism and grit on an intimate story of two people. 

It is those two people — that is to say, Ms. Viswanathan and Mr. Soni — who make the film. The former is blessed with an enviable deadpan, the latter a spindly knack for physical comedy. They’re both adorable. How could they not be? “7 Days” is a low-key pleasure and a welcome respite during award season excess.