How will we ever make sense of the dizzyingly photogenic swirl of city-hopping and bedpost-notching a degree from the University of Edinburgh generates? One Day copes via the gimmick of catching up with graduates Dexter and Emma on the same day each year after graduation.

Every train cabin between here and Penzance seems to have a copy of David Nichols’ weepy bestseller in it, but this film adaptation from An Education director Lone Scherfig sadly slumbers past Waverley Station and ends up at Edinburgh Park. Although sounding promising, it’s ultimately an obscurely industrial wasteland.

A weird vagueness infuses everything about One Day. What did they study at our institution? MAs in shiny hair and turning every banter sesh into significant emotional insight, apparently: we’re never actually told. The yearly check-in widget results in a confusing collision of scenes that quickly becomes tedious. Ultimately, they are a burden to Scherfig’s sweetly shot yarn of a more-than-just-friends-ship.

Linguists will trace Anne Hathaway’s bizarre between-continents accent to remotest Easter Island. Enigmatic and immovable, her Emma is naught but a Moai rock to Jim Sturgess’ charismatic cad Dexter throughout. Emma acts as a hanky for Dexter’s coke-nosebleeds and a raison d’être for his empty existence as a nationally reviled TV presenter. Their patchwork ballad of near-misses and drunken “I miss you” calls results in romance via repetition. Like an over-played pop song whose irksomeness is  eventually overtaken by queasy hum-alongs, the mis-matched twosome become harmoniously destined. Sweet, but One Day could be Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”.