Finding Emily (12A)

Talented musician Owen works as a sound engineer at a university in Manchester. One night in a club, he meets a girl called Emily dressed as a fairy and is smitten. When she attempts to leave with friends, Owen asks for her phone number and she types her digits into his mobile phone. The next morning, Owen realises she mistyped the number and is heartbroken. In desperation, he joins forces with another Emily to find his dream girl.

LondonNet Film Review

Finding Emily (15) Film Review from LondonNet

A feelgood Gen Z rom-com from the producers of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually, which begins with a meet cute at a booze-fuelled Manchester student club night, should work. Lead actors Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice are innately likable, the dramatic set-up of Rachel Hirons’ script is modelled on the covert duplicity of 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s All That, and Minnie Driver mines giggles as the university’s long-suffering dean. Yet something about Finding Emily does not click into place and the preordained gooeyness of the film’s final stretch of self-reflection feels performative rather than heartfelt or hard-earned…

Owen (Fearn) works as a sound engineer at Manchester City University. He lives with his playfully antagonistic older brother, Matt (Jack Riddiford), and Matt’s partner Freya (Isabella Laughland) in the family home, which holds memories of happier times with their late mother. One night, Owen encounters free-spirited student Emily (Sadie Soverall) dressed as a fairy and is smitten. He asks for her phone number and she types into his mobile phone. The next morning, Owen sends Emily a text and realises her contact details are incomplete.

He embarks on a relentless quest to track down his Emily from among the 318 registered on campus. Psychology student Emily Raine (Rice), who is writing her final thesis on madness induced by romantic attachment, is convinced Owen would be a perfect case study for her essay. “He’s my very own Stanford prison experiment,” she gushes to Professor Westlake (Prasanna Puwanarajah). She offers to help Owen and he is blissfully unaware that Emily R is exploiting his misery to secure a top grade. Meanwhile, Emily R’s spiralling obsession with finding the mystery woman puts a strain on her relationship with best friend Anna (Cora Kirk) but does offers temporary distraction from her obsession with old flame Tristan (Timothy Innes).

Directed with a light touch by first-timer Alicia MacDonald, Finding Emily loses its way as Rice’s accomplice repeatedly dodges opportunities to end her self-serving deception. She persists, with devastating consequences, exploiting Owen’s naivete as fodder for intellectual analysis. Emily R’s disregard for other people’s feelings renders her unsympathetic, bordering on dislikeable, making it almost impossible for screenwriter Hirons to redeem the film’s romantic heroine and convince me that she was worthy of Owen’s forgiveness.

Fearn’s innate charm is heavily traded currency and Rice skips around the contradictions of her tenacious international student, who likens ham-fisted British flirting to “a random word generator”. As an eternally hopeful romantic and unabashed sucker for rom-com conventions, it feels like heresy to admit that I was actively and passionately rooting against the prefabricated happy ever after.

– Jo Planter