{"id":750423,"date":"2026-08-26T15:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T15:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/750423\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T15:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T15:08:10","slug":"finding-emily-review-the-working-title-romcom-gets-a-fresh-makeover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/750423\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Finding Emily’ Review: The Working Title Romcom Gets a Fresh Makeover"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe big-screen romantic comedy is unfashionable enough these days that it tends to come dressed up in at least one of two ways: with a quasi-absurd high concept (see this summer\u2019s \u201cOne Night Only\u201d) or draped in enough ironic quote marks to make clear that the filmmakers are rolling their eyes right along with you. At first glance, \u201cFinding Emily<\/a>\u201d threatens to do just that. Its heroine, after all, is a college student writing a literal dissertation on the real-world impracticality of romantic attachment; she enters the film quoting Freud (\u201cLove is a state of temporary psychosis\u201d) and calling out manic pixie dreamgirl tropes. Happily, however, director Alicia MacDonald<\/a>\u2018s film is both smarter and sweeter than that: smart enough to identify the GenZ sexual politics that make a fool\u2019s errand of the supposedly grand gestures that are the romcom\u2019s stock-in-trade, and sweet enough to know when those gestures work anyway.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s significant that \u201cFinding Emily\u201d comes from the stable of Working Title Films, the production company that practically patented the British romcom decades ago with the Richard Curtis-scripted run of \u201cFour Weddings and Funeral,\u201d \u201cNotting Hill,\u201d \u201cLove Actually\u201d and the \u201cBridget Jones\u201d series. Their DNA is traceable in this film\u2019s wry comedy of embarrassment, but there\u2019s a palpable generational shift in its tone and presentation: MacDonald, making a sparky feature debut, and screenwriter Rachel Hirons run all manner of boy-meets-girl clich\u00e9s through a Zoomer worldview of gender constructs and relationship dynamics, without the resulting film ever feeling strained or focus-grouped in its youthful outlook. And when it does border on cheese, it owns that: \u201cTrue freedom in this life is knowing you\u2019re cringe and doing it anyway,\u201d observes one character, quite wisely. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s more wisdom where that came from in \u201cFinding Emily,\u201d though little of it passes the lips of Owen Brompton (Spike Fearn<\/a>), a gentle-souled but none-too-bright aspiring musician who has put a lot of effort into trying to look like a third Gallagher brother. The setting is Manchester, after all, and even if the film largely revolves around 21st-century babies, it shows Oasis-aping rock and indie bands still clogging the local scene, while Joy Division kicks off an on-point soundtrack: Often unloved on screen, the city gets an actual valentine here, shot by DP Rachel Clark with cozy intimacy even on its grayest days, and a fuzzy beer-goggles glow at night.<\/p>\n

\n\tOwen has certainly had a few when he kicks the plot into motion at the student union club where, though not a student himself, he\u2019s working as a sound technician. Things are already a bit hazy when he gets chatting to a cheery, kooky girl (Sadie Soverall) wearing glittery fairy wings, swiftly convinces himself she\u2019s the love of his life, and gets her number before she flits off. In the cold light of day, however, he finds the number is a digit short, and all he has is a name: Emily. What\u2019s a lad to do? Probably not go to the college campus to crash lecture halls calling for random girls with that name, but that\u2019s what he does anyway \u2014 which is how he meets American psychology student Emily Raine (Angourie Rice<\/a>), who may not be the Emily he wants, but is almost certainly the one he needs.<\/p>\n

\n\tBrainy and inquisitive, she\u2019s intrigued enough by his demented search to offer to help. What he doesn\u2019t know, however, is her ulterior motive. She\u2019s finishing her dissertation on the self-sabotaging nature of romantic love, and needs one live case study to round it out \u2014 making Owen, in her words, \u201cmy very own Stanford Prison Experiment.\u201d The idea that she\u2019s depending on this very tenuous thesis to secure a first-class degree and a lofty post-graduation placement is the wooliest logic in Hirons\u2019 otherwise very sharp script, but we can let it go by, in part because it\u2019s clear the booksmart Emily still has a lot to learn about actual human behavior. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe opposites-attract chemistry between the two is obvious from the word go, but Emily is insistent that Owen is \u201cjust data\u201d \u2014 which is how she can stitch him up royally by giving him the email address of every Emily enrolled at the university (318 in total), and encouraging him to mass-mail the lot. It would be a bad idea even if the hapless Owen knew the difference between CC and BCC, but from her perspective, it yields fast, fascinating results: an immediate campus-wide uproar over the \u201ctoxic virgin\u201d stalking women he doesn\u2019t know, which soon goes viral, as \u201cEmail Guy\u201d becomes a meme and an international hot topic. <\/p>\n

\n\tMacDonald and editor Phil Hignett have a keen, witty sense of how the online realm crashes offline living, seamlessly integrating deadly-accurate TikTok parodies into the film\u2019s breezy narrative flow. Hirons\u2019 writing, for its part, engages thoughtfully with the rights and wrongs of internet cancel culture, and the ways in which its flattens both issues and personalities; in so doing, the film finds sympathy for both Owen \u2014 who\u2019s neither toxic nor, as he keeps politely insisting, a virgin, just a bit dim \u2014 and the women who are, quite reasonably and often hilariously, fed up with being pestered by men at all, be they abusive or merely naive. In Emily, meanwhile, it gives us a romantic heroine who\u2019s also a bit of a villain, given actual moral stakes to wrangle, and played by Rice (the Australian star of 2024\u2019s \u201cMean Girls\u201d musical) with just the right balance of natural, straight-talking warmth and defensive spikiness.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis clever construction wouldn\u2019t really fly if we didn\u2019t ultimately want Emily and Owen to look past all these disasters of their own making to see that they\u2019re really made for each other. That we do is a credit both to impeccable casting \u2014 every role here is imaginatively filled, from characterful best-friend support to a delicious Minnie Driver as the university\u2019s above-it-all dean \u2014 and the combined, incalculable likability of Rice and Fearn, whose active and passive energies, respectively, spark so genially off each other. <\/p>\n

\n\tFearn, saddled last year with an unplayable incel role in James L. Brooks\u2019 abysmal \u201cElla McCay,\u201d rebounds here what what ought to be a star-making turn, finding a core of goofy, hopeful humanity in what could be a hollow punchline of a character. It\u2019s a performance that, like everything else that works about \u201cFinding Emily,\u201d is hard to make look this easy. Emily\u2019s misguided research ultimately proves that love stories can\u2019t be plotted and graphed like science experiments; more modern studio romantic comedies could stand to learn the same lesson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The big-screen romantic comedy is unfashionable enough these days that it tends to come dressed up in at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[247871,247872,96,247873,2839,247874,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-750423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alicia-macdonald","tag-angourie-rice","tag-entertainment","tag-finding-emily","tag-movies","tag-spike-fearn","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}