Joel on Film

It would certainly be accurate to call Finding Emily a romantic movie, but to be more precise here, let’s say that it’s hopelessly romantic. That would definitely describe its hero, a down-on-his-luck, but generally good, guy named Owen (Spike Fearn) who is looking for love but never in the right place. In something of a cosmic joke, he meets the girl of dreams—but briefly, at a nightclub, in the middle of a lot of background noise, and without a last name or even a complete telephone number with which to work.

That last one is how Owen finds himself in the purely, but likably, farcical premise of Rachel Hirons’s screenplay: The number that the girl gave him was one digit short, and as he only knows her first name, Emily, he embarks upon a probably hopeless journey to find her. All he needs is some way of contacting the Emily he met (she’s played by Sadie Soverall), and just as anyone else would, he assumes she’s a student at the nearby university. That’s where the other character in this story comes in.

Her name is also Emily (Angourie Rice), and the two connect when Owen, told that his description of the real Emily sort of matches this one, decides to show up unannounced at her classroom door (Prasanna Puwanarajah is very funny as the professor, Mr. Westlake, who is just barely hanging by a thread of sanity on any given day). This is obviously not the action of a stable young man, but Fearn’s performance and Hirons’s careful framing of this character ensure that we’re never creeped out by him. In fact, the movie makes itself another type of farce—something of a satire, in fact, about the type of culture that leads both to the actions Owen believes are necessary and to the frenzied response and backlash that arise from it.

The other Emilys, led by a militant one (Kat Ronney) who wants justice for women everywhere, join together in a guerrilla movement to stop what they see as toxic masculinity. A campus radio host (Nadia Parkes), displaying not an ounce of journalistic objectivity, uses her platform to spread rumors. By the time all this is done, Owen fears, the real Emily won’t even want to reunite with him, and he employs Rice’s Emily to help him.

Unfortunately for him—and, ultimately, the movie’s good will, though we’ll get to that later—this Emily just happens to be preparing her final presentation and essay for Westlake’s class, and for her topic, she’s chosen the lengths to which some will go to find romantic love. She posits that such a pursuit inspires only madness, and Owen becomes her subject of study. One can probably predict that, eventually, Owen will discover this, leading to the kind of falling-out that can be resolved by smart people talking it out intelligently.

Unfortunately for us, this is a romantic comedy, and no amount of clever psychoanalysis of the genre—which the movie does occasionally succeed at providing, mostly by grounding the character of Owen with the ones he has around him—can quite lift the film out of its inevitable slide into familiar territory. Most of that is because, despite Rice’s own likability, the character of her Emily is simply neither interesting nor particularly developed beyond the basic building blocks of a romcom character. After a strong start, centering Owen as the character we like and want to follow, Hirons and director Alicia MacDonald subtly shift their focus away from him and onto her, a decision that proves both disappointing.

On the sidelines during its finale, then, the story of Owen continues, and it contains a few notes of truth, a couple of good jokes (including the best one, about the very event that incites the story), and an unconventional resolution to his half of this story. That’s only on the sidelines, though, because the other half of the perspective in Finding Emily is only the stuff of a typical romantic comedy, complete with a pair of confessions (one grave and the other heartwarming), a Big Speech to rally some tears, and the broad feeling of cutesy happiness that feels unearned.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)