Finding Emily is a warm, hilarious, and utterly clever romantic comedy that shines with a witty story and standout performances. The script weaves excellent commentary on contemporary social norms, using its university setting to create humour from the innocent missteps of a young man looking for love.
The film stars Spike Fearn (Alien: Romulus) as Owen and Angourie Rice (The Nice Guys) as Emily. It is directed by Alicia MacDonald in her feature directorial debut, with a script by writer Rachel Hirons (A Guide to Second Date Sex).
The romantic comedy tells the story of a lovesick musician (Owen, played by Spike Fearn) who when given the wrong number for his dream girl is determined to find her. When he discovers a different girl by the same name instead (Emily, played by Angourie Rice), she offers to help him find the real Emily he’s searching for. In doing so, they spark a hilarious campus-wide frenzy at a Manchester university that tests their hearts and ambitions along the way.
A quick clarification for this review, there are multiple Emilys in this film. The first one is the Emily that Owen meets when dancing at a bar, whom he receives the wrong number for. The second Emily is played by Angourie Rice, a psychology student who Owen meets accidentally during his search for the original Emily.
Finding Emily is an effortlessly charming and wonderfully uplifting film, which blends witty social commentary with raw authenticity in the way it depicts its somewhat naïve, loveable, and deeply passionate characters. It shines in particular because of how authentically it makes you feel the emotions of its lead characters, while placing them in situations that push the limits of how far they’re willing to go to achieve their desires.
Spike Fearn’s character Owen appears optimistic, and lovesick while still maintaining a sense of cheekiness and wit that allows him to straddle the often-difficult situations he’s placed in during the story with an unpredictable chaos and charm. Spike Fearn’s performance is outstanding, as he bustles across the campus with the wide-eyed certainty that he’ll find Emily out of sheer conviction, he’s instantly endearing. Importantly, writer Alicia MacDonald overlays her characters with backstories that make them feel real, flawed, and interesting. In Owen’s case, the recent death of his mother, his choice not go to university, and choosing to leave his musical endeavours for a job at a pub give us a lot of reasons to root for him.
Angourie Rice is also brilliant as the fierce psychology student Emily who navigates the world of university social politics with an eager sharpness, while also providing a smart and loveable counterpart to Owen. She takes Owen on (without his knowledge) as her psychology thesis case study for what she terms love-psychosis, which drives people to the madness of self-sabotage in the pursuit of love. In pushing him further and further to find the real Emily, the resulting fallout from their actions causes uproar across the university and social media.
The story is beautifully woven. Like many romantic comedies, a clever reversal of fates results in each character learning about themselves and finding that the thing they were looking for in love was unexpectedly in front of them the whole time.
While it may sound familiar, Rachel Hirons’ script iterates upon this trope seen in classics like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail by injecting it with a uniquely well-informed layer of social commentary on contemporary university politics, views around toxic masculinity, and the compounding effects of social communication online. This, combined with exceedingly well-written characters who are distinct in their motivations, interest and personalities mean that the twists and turns the story takes are just as satisfying because they feel fresh and well-earned.
The choice to layer the film with complications that arise from competing social forces on the university campus is one that adds humour, interest, and relevance to the story. This reaches a crescendo when the university podcast picks up the story that Owen has emailed 300+ girls named Emily at the university to find which one is the real Emily he fell in love with. The reactions from girls on campus and online brand him a creep for doing so, at one point calling him a “Virgin Rapist”, a reasonably clever oxymoron.
The reaction from the strongly opinionated student president, whose strong progressive stance places Owen in the position of having to defend his purported actions as a predator make for a tough situation where the audience isn’t sure how Owen can absolve himself. The fact that scriptwriter Hirons has already layered her character with a level of honesty and earnestness means that the audience trusts him, and allows them to empathise with the situation of a naïve young man who is willing to take extra steps to find love in his blind belief that he shared a moment with a girl who was meant to be his soulmate.
It’s raw and eye-opening when he tries to navigate the reaction from girls who see this as overstepping a boundary or being unable to accept that the Emily in question may have given him a wrong number on purpose because she didn’t like him. But Spike Fearn’s performance reads like an open book, he’s brash and endearing in a way that makes you trust him, and the script backs this up by showing you how his actions are honest every step of the way, mostly because while he starts self-motivated he ends up being encouraged by psychology student Emily who is pushing him to go further for the purpose of proving the hypothesis for her paper.
The resulting catharsis when Owen does find a meaningful connection through the course of the film is immensely fulfilling, and the story as a whole stands as one of the most refreshing depictions of the complicated landscape that well-meaning young men can face in a world where it’s hard to know what the best move to make is, especially when it feels like every person and their camera phone is watching and judging.
Director Alicia MacDonald does an excellent job in her feature directorial debut with this film. A mix clever editing, inventive visual tricks, and generally beautiful textures in the way she shoots the warmly lit interiors and stunning historic landscapes of the city of Manchester provide her film with a refined yet quirky and youthful visual language.
With a script that often creates momentum through moments of building chaos, MacDonald does a great job of building tension and scale by deploying fast-paced editing techniques and match-cuts to give the audience a sense of the speed and scale of things happening.
For instance, when Owen rushes through a series of Manchester bars offering cash bribes to bartenders to give him the names of which girls attended a birthday party the night before, we see his escapades at numerous different locations flash by in a series of match cuts that splice quickly back and forth showing us him repeating the same action in different places. It’s fun, fast-paced, and makes for a great comedic payoff when he reveals he spent 120 pounds to unsuccessfully bribe people that told him nothing.
Another scene where Owen sends out a group email to over 300 different girls at the university employs a great visual device that shows each girl appearing in his apartment bedroom as they read and react to the email they all received at the same time. The visual metaphor shows the frantic and overwhelming experience of contacting that many people at the same time and being bombarded with responses. It’s clever and creative visual tricks like this one make for an even more engaging impact that simply cross-cutting between different reactions.
Finding Emily is a warm, hilarious, and utterly clever romantic comedy that shines with a witty story and standout performances. The script weaves excellent commentary on contemporary social norms, using its university setting to create humour from the innocent missteps of a young man looking for love.
Finding Emily is in cinemas from May 22nd, and May 21st in Australia.
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