REVIEW: ‘Finding Emily’ Is A Good Romcom Searching For Greatness

In Finding Emily, the classic boy-meets-girl romcom formula unfolds lengthily. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl’s name and phone number, boy realizes he didn’t get the complete phone number and goes on a city-wide campaign to find her. All he’s got is a first name, Emily, and the realization that there are 318 girls at the school named Emily. And technology, that great tool of connection, only complicates things instead of making it easier.

Owen (Spike Fearn) is an awkward, earnest twenty-something working as a sound engineer at the (fictional) Manchester City University’s student union. During a particularly busy night at work, he hits it off with a girl (Sadie Soverall) wearing fairy wings in anticipation of heading to a costume party. The fairy-winged girl is pretty, funny, and invites Owen to dance, which is about all an awkward, earnest twenty-something like him could want. As she leaves for the costume party, she gives Owen her name–Emily–and leaves her number in his phone.

The following day, a series of undelivered text messages leads Owen to realize that Emily accidentally left out a number when giving Owen her digits. With no last name, picture, or idea of who Emily is beyond being a student at Manchester City University, Owen sets out to find her. And in the process, he meets an entirely different Emily (Angourie Rice), an American studying psychology and in need of something to boost her looming dissertation on how love turns people mad and is evolutionarily unnecessary.

Finding Emily gains steady momentum due to a charming premise and Angourie Rice’s performance.

This Emily decides Owen’s quest for his dream Emily is the perfect case study to get her top marks for her dissertation. Emily’s professor (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and roommate (Cora Kirk) question the ethics of this project, but the dissertation is due in a matter of weeks, and Emily’s out of ideas. Keeping her psychological studies a secret from Owen, Emily helps Owen search for his dream girl across Manchester.

Finding Emily possesses a charming enough premise, and certainly has a winning pair in its leads. Rice, always a delightful presence on-screen, outshines her costar, but Rachel Hirons‘ screenplay accounts for that. Emily is driven, opinionated, and assertive where Owen’s solo attempts to find his Emily are deliberately painful to watch. Fearn embodies Owen’s heartfelt earnestness with sweetly winning charm. Owen’s aimlessness, beyond finding the Emily that so enchanted him, feels painfully relatable.

Where Finding Emily lets its winning duo down is in rounding out its world. Some, like Emily’s aforementioned professor and roommate, are given more screen time than others, and feel like valuable parts of her world. Owen’s personal life is less built out, with his brother Matt (Jack Riddiford) and Matt’s girlfriend Freya (Isabella Laughland) only conveniently appearing to dole out life advice when crucial to the plot.

Director Alicia MacDonald gives enough space for the chemistry between Emily and Owen to flourish. 

After Owen sends out a mass email to the university’s 318 Emilys, the film’s third and final significant Emily (Kat Ronney) takes issue with Owen’s methodology, insisting a creep or stalker must be behind the quest to find one singular Emily. A known student activist, this Emily tries to get the university’s dean (Minnie Driver) involved, a subplot that illuminates Finding Emily‘s issue with its supporting characters. 

Driver’s dean functions like a disinterested version of Tim Meadows‘ principal in Mean Girls. Where Meadows in Mean Girls at least had deadpan reactions to that film’s shenanigans, Driver’s Dean Watkinson is actively unwilling in participate in the plot, encouraging the student activist Emily take her protests and concerns elsewhere. It’s disappointing to see Driver underutilized.

The world of Finding Emily feels much smaller than its vividly-drawn protagonists, save for its beautiful use of Manchester. It’s refreshing to see a British romcom set somewhere other than London, illuminating other parts of the country and highlighting its modern and classic architecture. Director Alicia MacDonald lets her leads explore the city, and their own burgeoning chemistry, with a grounded realism. The sensitive earnestness of Owen’s quest for his Emily, and Emily’s increasingly collapsing views of the futility of love, are sweet and compelling.

It’s not a reinvention but Finding Emily is a nice enough escape.

It’s not hard to guess where Finding Emily might go, but romcoms aren’t known for being the most inventive genre. Like Voicemails for Isabelle, it’s keenly aware of the ethical murkiness of its premise. That self-awareness, a hallmark of 2020s romcoms where 1990s or 2000s were blissfully ignorant, feels like a built-in defense against arguments for creepiness or bad ethics.

Owen’s search for his Emily, though well-meant, is often poorly thought-out without help from Rice’s Emily. And Emily’s use of Owen as a case study is questioned at every turn. It feels weirdly aggressive, how often the supporting characters want to question their characters’ motives, as if a viewer isn’t smart enough to question them on their own.

Finding Emily won’t reinvent the romcom, nor will it likely be mentioned in the same breath as Notting Hill or Bridget Jones’s Diary as paragons of Britain’s contributions to the genre. (When will Britain have a romcom king so prevalent as Hugh Grant again?) But it’s an effective Visit Manchester ad and a fun take on unlikely friendship. And if your search for a romcom on a Friday night stops here, it’s not a bad way to pass the time.

Finding Emily is out now in theaters.