Finding Emily: A Fun Modern Day Rom-Com with a '90s Vibe

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

Finding Emily is one of those rom-coms that feels as if it was crafted in the 1990s — see also 2023’s Bottoms, 2019’s Booksmart and, if you want to hit the nail on the head, Mid90s from 2018.

The plot works best without the Internet and social media, and so the screenplay by Rachel Hirons does what it can to ignore or tiptoe around the technology, sometimes awkwardly so.

Spike Fearn stars as Owen, who works as a sound engineer at a student union pub at Manchester City University. (It’s a made-up name, not unlike TMU). One night while trying the keep the levels balanced and his boss happy, he bumps into a young woman. They chat, they dance, they vibe. They both look smitten.

Spike Fearn is on a quest for an Emily, although not this Emily (Angourie Rice).

Then she has to go, pulled out of the pub by a group of friends. She gives Owen her numbers, says her name is Emily — and vanishes. The next morning, Owen realizes he’s a number and a last name short. In short, he has no way to find her.

But heaven hath no energy like a young man in love. Owen’s first thought: How many Emilys could there be among the 40,000-strong student body? Turns out: 318. (For the skeptical viewer, I’ve run the numbers on this popular turn-of-the-century name, and the math checks out. Fun fact: There are dozens of variations on the spelling.)

Owen’s first attempt nets him Emily Raine, played by Angourie Rice. She’s not his Emily, but offers to help find her. She claims to be a romantic, but the truth is pretty much the opposite; she’s working on a thesis that love is a madness that causes people to self-destruct, and she sees in Owen a case study who is already halfway there. Or as she puts it: “My very own Stanford Prison Experiment!”

As directed by Alicia MacDonald, and propped up mightily by its leading man’s nice-guy energy, Finding Emily has great fun letting Owen continue his quixotic quest with Emily Raine as his Sancho Panza. (Kudos to Australia’s Rice for playing an Iowa native in a British film, by the way. That’s some range.)

Owen’s earnest attempts earn him the ire of the rest of the school’s Emilys, and the film is self-conscious enough to note that “gotta go here’s my (wrong) number” is a technique women use to ditch creeps, while also making it clear that “our” Owen is pure of heart.

It’s basically a two-hander, but there are some nice supporting roles including Minnie Driver as the mom (I mean the dean; same diff!), Prasanna Puwanarajah as Emily’s morose professor, and Nadia Parkes as a student podcaster who sees Owen’s story as her ticket to fame — and the worse it looks, the further she can travel on it.

Finding Emily name-checks Casablanca and the stock fiction character Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and at one point shamelessly steals its line-delivery cadence from When Harry Met Sally. But it remains its own story and, in true ’90s fashion, lets us root for the characters, not against all odds, but with them.

We know where this is going. It’s still fun watching it get there.

Oh, and one last throwback element; stay through the closing credits for an impromptu music video (!) and a series of where-are-they-now title cards. As a Gen-Xer I approve.

Finding Emily. Directed by Alicia MacDonald. Starring Spike Fearn, and Angourie Rice. Opens Aug. 28 in cinemas.