There is a only one aspect of The Romantic Comedy that truly matters: Do we care about the couple that is inevitably destined to be together from the moment we meet them onscreen? Do we care if and how they end up madly in love? Are we rooting for them in spite of their own best efforts to avoid facing the reality of their joint romantic fate? Are we cool with spending 97 minutes with them, or are they insufferable toads? Because it is the rare outing in this most formulaic of genres that transcends its tropes: the initial meeting defined by, at best, a prickly aversion to each other; their navigation of the cascade of obstacles to their inexorable togetherness; and their somehow always polar opposite flip-flopping levels of desire and disgust until they finally surrender themselves to their happily-ever-after.
When the destination is foregone, the journey sure as hell had better be worth taking.
Happily — unexpectedly — the journey Finding Emily takes us on is very much worth taking.
I’m as shocked as you are. Cuz it sounds pretty dire. Guy meets girl, has a pleasant evening with her (or so he thinks), and gets her number just as she runs off like Cinderella into the night. But then, the next day, when he goes to text her, he discovers that the number she tapped into his phone is missing a digit. Did she do it deliberately? As women know all too well, giving a guy a number that isn’t actually yours is a time-honored tactic for avoiding the male rage that too often comes with a romantic rejection.
Sweet, slightly goofy twentysomething Owen (Spike Fearn: Back to Black, The Batman) is convinced Emily (Sadie Soverall) made a mistake in her haste and that they had a real connection — and, actually, we are not inclined to disagree with him; he doesn’t seem the type to fly off the handle at a rejection. So he sets out to find her. How difficult could it be? He knows she’s a student Manchester* City University, where he works as a sound engineer in the student union. How many Emilys can there be at a single school? Even a big one?
(*Manchester, England, not Manchester, New Hampshire. American audiences may struggle a bit with some of the accents. But it’s really nice to have a British rom-com that’s not set in London.)
The first Emily Owen tracks down is the wrong one: This Emily (Angourie Rice: Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Beguiled) is a psychology student who happens to be writing a thesis on the insanity of romantic attachment… and Owen is, as she excitedly tells her professor, “my very own Stanford Prison Experiment.” She agrees to help Owen find his Emily; he doesn’t realize he’s become the secret case study for her paper.
Of course, it is psychology Emily, not Emily-from-the-night-before, that Owen is clearly perfect for, and she for him. How else? She’s a romantic cynic; he’s a hopeless romantic — they simply must be won over by each other eventually, right?
Apart from the delightful fact that Fearn and Rice are utterly charming seperately as well as when they’re bouncing off each other, Finding Emily has lots to say about modern dating and gender relations, which it does in a way that manages to be caustic, optimistic, and exasperated all at once. (The clever, genuinely heartfelt script is by Rachel Hirons.) Without spoiling all the endearing pleasures of this — here’s that word again — unexpectedly enchanting film, Owen’s quest to find “his” Emily goes viral on social media, and sparks all sorts of debate — on campus and beyond — about, well, precisely the sort of behavior that typically flies under the wire in rom-coms. A bald description of the behavior Owen engages in to find his Emily — I haven’t mentioned all of it — sure does sound like the kind of stalkery delinquency that the genre often celebrates in our “culture of toxic masculinity” (which yet another Emily decries). Is Owen a “creep” or just a “soft lad” (north-of-England slang for a guy who’s a bit of a doofus but lovable anyway)? Psychology Emily instantly pegs missing-digit Emily as, for Owen, “an actual manic pixie dream girl,” a literal embodiment of the perfect fantasy girl that often afflicts these kinds of movies. She’s not wrong.
There is so much to love here! Director Alicia MacDonald, a TV veteran making her feature debut, stages a funny visual representation of being on the wrong end of a mass email reply-all chain. Every single supporting character here is full of life, sharply drawn by that wise, funny script and a terrific cast, including Minnie Driver (Cinderella, Beyond the Lights) as the university dean, Prasanna Puwanarajah as psychology Emily’s professor, Fiona Allen (24 Hour Party People) as a university receptionist, Cora Kirk as psychology Emily’s roommate, and Jack Riddiford (Murder on the Orient Express, Dunkirk) and Isabella Laughland (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Slaughterhouse Rulez) as Owen’s brother and sister-in-law. There’s even great music to heal one’s soul to.
“I’m a little bit stressed about the whole thing,” Owen declares at one point about his ridiculous odyssey. But you won’t be. Finding Emily is an instant comfort movie, and effortlessly so, and very much something we need right now.
more films like this:
• Rye Lane [Hulu US | BBC iPlayer UK | Disney+ UK]
• Ingrid Goes West [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix US | Kanopy US | Mubi UK]
