Click here to read the full article.
The big-screen romantic comedy is unfashionable enough these days that it tends to come dressed up in at least one of two ways: with a quasi-absurd high concept (see this summer’s “One Night Only”) or draped in enough ironic
quote marks to make clear that the filmmakers are rolling their eyes right along with you. At first glance, “Finding Emily” threatens to do just that. Its heroine, after all, is a college student writing a literal dissertation on the real-world impracticality of romantic attachment; she enters the film quoting Freud (“Love is a state of temporary psychosis”) and calling out manic pixie dreamgirl tropes. Happily, however, director Alicia MacDonald’s film is both smarter and sweeter than that: smart enough to identify the GenZ sexual politics that make a fool’s errand of the supposedly grand gestures that are the romcom’s stock-in-trade, and sweet enough to know when those gestures work anyway.
It’s significant that “Finding Emily” comes from the stable of Working Title Films, the production company that practically patented the British romcom decades ago with the Richard Curtis-scripted run of “Four Weddings and Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually” and the “Bridget Jones” series. Their DNA is traceable in this film’s wry comedy of embarrassment, but there’s a palpable generational shift in its tone and presentation: MacDonald, making a sparky feature debut, and screenwriter Rachel Hirons run all manner of boy-meets-girl clichés through a Zoomer worldview of gender constructs and relationship dynamics, without the resulting film ever feeling strained or focus-grouped in its youthful outlook. And when it does border on cheese, it owns that: “True freedom in this life is knowing you’re cringe and doing it anyway,” observes one character, quite wisely.
There’s more wisdom where that came from in “Finding Emily,” though little of it passes the lips of Owen Brompton (Spike Fearn), a gentle-souled but none-too-bright aspiring musician who has put a lot of effort into trying to look like a third Gallagher brother. The setting is Manchester, after all, and even if the film largely revolves around 21st-century babies, it shows Oasis-aping rock and indie bands still clogging the local scene, while Joy Division kicks off an on-point soundtrack: Often unloved on screen, the city gets an actual valentine here, shot by DP Rachel Clark with cozy intimacy even on its grayest days, and a fuzzy beer-goggles glow at night.
Owen has certainly had a few when he kicks the plot into motion at the student union club where, though not a student himself, he’s working as a sound technician. Things are already a bit hazy when he gets chatting to a cheery, kooky girl (Sadie Soverall) wearing glittery fairy wings, swiftly convinces himself she’s the love of his life, and gets her number before she flits off. In the cold light of day, however, he finds the number is a digit short, and all he has is a name: Emily. What’s a lad to do? Probably not go to the college campus to crash lecture halls calling for random girls with that name, but that’s what he does anyway — which is how he meets American psychology student Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), who may not be the Emily he wants, but is almost certainly the one he needs.
Brainy and inquisitive, she’s intrigued enough by his demented search to offer to help. What he doesn’t know, however, is her ulterior motive. She’s finishing her dissertation on the self-sabotaging nature of romantic love, and needs one live case study to round it out — making Owen, in her words, “my very own Stanford Prison Experiment.” The idea that she’s depending on this very tenuous thesis to secure a first-class degree and a lofty post-graduation placement is the wooliest logic in Hirons’ otherwise very sharp script, but we can let it go by, in part because it’s clear the booksmart Emily still has a lot to learn about actual human behavior.
The opposites-attract chemistry between the two is obvious from the word go, but Emily is insistent that Owen is “just data” — which is how she can stitch him up royally by giving him the email address of every Emily enrolled at the university (318 in total), and encouraging him to mass-mail the lot. It would be a bad idea even if the hapless Owen knew the difference between CC and BCC, but from her perspective, it yields fast, fascinating results: an immediate campus-wide uproar over the “toxic virgin” stalking women he doesn’t know, which soon goes viral, as “Email Guy” becomes a meme and an international hot topic.
MacDonald and editor Phil Hignett have a keen, witty sense of how the online realm crashes offline living, seamlessly integrating deadly-accurate TikTok parodies into the film’s breezy narrative flow. Hirons’ writing, for its part, engages thoughtfully with the rights and wrongs of internet cancel culture, and the ways in which its flattens both issues and personalities; in so doing, the film finds sympathy for both Owen — who’s neither toxic nor, as he keeps politely insisting, a virgin, just a bit dim — and the women who are, quite reasonably and often hilariously, fed up with being pestered by men at all, be they abusive or merely naive. In Emily, meanwhile, it gives us a romantic heroine who’s also a bit of a villain, given actual moral stakes to wrangle, and played by Rice (the Australian star of 2024’s “Mean Girls” musical) with just the right balance of natural, straight-talking warmth and defensive spikiness.
This clever construction wouldn’t really fly if we didn’t ultimately want Emily and Owen to look past all these disasters of their own making to see that they’re really made for each other. That we do is a credit both to impeccable casting — every role here is imaginatively filled, from characterful best-friend support to a delicious Minnie Driver as the university’s above-it-all dean — and the combined, incalculable likability of Rice and Fearn, whose active and passive energies, respectively, spark so genially off each other.
Fearn, saddled last year with an unplayable incel role in James L. Brooks’ abysmal “Ella McCay,” rebounds here what what ought to be a star-making turn, finding a core of goofy, hopeful humanity in what could be a hollow punchline of a character. It’s a performance that, like everything else that works about “Finding Emily,” is hard to make look this easy. Emily’s misguided research ultimately proves that love stories can’t be plotted and graphed like science experiments; more modern studio romantic comedies could stand to learn the same lesson.
