Finding Emily review: this gorgeous rom-com really pops

They say you should never judge a book by its cover. It’s an idiom flogged across its weary life, sure, but one that’s relevant to director Alicia MacDonald’s surprisingly peppy teen rom-com, Finding Emily.

Look at the wanly pastel-hued poster, with its generic photoshop cut-outs of Australian star Angourie Rice and co-lead Spike Fearn from Alien: Romulus, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in for a drippy rerun of the same old fluff.

Truly terrible advertising aside – the last gasp of a tragically dying art soon to be replaced with delirium-fingered AI slop – Finding Emily is, in fact, the most fun I’ve had with the genre in a very long time, certainly more original than nostalgia-spewing The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Boy meets manic pixie dream girl

Fearn plays Owen, a possibly neurodivergent lad with abundant energy and a kind soul. He’s a thwarted musician who’s slumming it as an audio tech, enduring the daily grind at a university in a jumping Manchester, England, including monitoring the sound levels at the student union club.

It’s here he runs into literal fairy wing-wearing ‘manic pixie girl’ Emily, played by Sadie Soverall. Dancing the night away over beers and banter and sharing a good night kiss, it seems they’ll meet again. Except when she pops her number into Owen’s phone at kick-out, it’s a digit short – a fact that is roundly mocked by Owen’s boisterously loving brother Matt (Jack Riddiford) the next morning.

Matt’s girlfriend Freya (Foundation’s Isabella Laughland), who shares the cosy brick home left to them by their late mum, is far kinder in her ‘ah well’ pep talk. But Owen’s not for giving up. Certain that he’s found ‘the one’, he decides to plaster the campus with posters, hoping to find his Emily ever after.

Madly in love

Writer Rachel Hirons’ screenplay for Finding Emily is way smarter than it sounds. Our first Emily is a bait-and-switch misdirection, with the search for this mystery woman erroneously leading Owen to crash the psychology class of our prime Emily, an American from Ohio played by Rice.

She doesn’t believe in love and is planning to write her assessment paper about how it’s an evolutionary hang-up with no real purpose that’s akin to madness. Except we can see, long before Emily can, that she’s bedazzled by both Owen’s boy band cuteness and his heart-on-his-sleeve commitment to the quest, with MacDonald’s smartly paced film taking its sweet time with their misadventures, slowly building up a flickering spark between Rice and Fearn.

Things get off to a rocky start when Emily supplies Owen with the mailing list for all 300-plus of her namesakes enrolled on campus. He promptly fires off a hopeful missive, but has no clue about BCC-ing. The Emilys react in wildly differing, cutely montaged ways, from stunned to smitten to seriously pissed off.

The latter are led by the overtly Scottish student union rep, played by Julia Rogers, whose fury at this perceived invasion of privacy sparks a #MeToo-adjacent campus protest. This becomes a thorn in the butt of the Dean, in an amusing if underplayed cameo from Minnie Driver.

The subsequent social media storm sweeps far beyond the televised uni radio station to go global via a very well done TikTok-driven subplot, with Owen freaking out that he’s blown up his life. Of course, this being a rom-com, there also needs to be a big fall-out to pivot us into the final act.

Hirons sows the seeds early via Emily-prime, an otherwise delightful person who selfishly and somewhat foolishly decides to document Owen’s spiral as proof of her ‘love is madness’ thesis. This, without fessing up to either her search party buddy or her dubious and generally so-over-students professor (played by a scene-stealing Prasanna Puwanarajah). This, despite abundant cautions issued by her flatmate Anna (Cora Kirk) and Anna’s boyfriend Kyle (Anthony J Abraham).

Watch the trailer

Love is a battlefield

There are a lot of moving parts in Finding Emily, including a wonderfully diverse, possibly unwieldy cast. But MacDonald and editor Phil Hignett spin the plates with apparent ease. Even a casual extra’s callback, regarding whether Owen’s travails are news or not, is allowed time to shine.

All this while never losing sight of the integral push-and-pull between Owen and the overlooked Emily right under his nose. It helps that Rice and Fearn enjoy genuinely adorable chemistry that has you rooting for them to lose the blinkers, even if Emily is pretty badly behaved. There’s a subtle nod that this might, at least partly, be down to an estranged relationship with her mum. Love is a battlefield, after all.

Quite aside from the many additional Emilys, all adding to the chaotic good fun, Manchester herself is simply gorgeous. Finding Emily is shot mostly on location by cinematographer Rachel Clark, who clearly understands there’s no better backdrop than the real deal.

The city’s nightlife glimmers, including on iconic gay strip Canal Street, replete with abundant extras presumably from the real-deal community in a film that rides roughshod over gender and sexuality expectations, embracing love in all its colours.

From rain-slicked cobblestones to old man pubs and on to fancy bars, there’s all the moody lighting needed to make the film look astonishingly lush. It also sounds fabulous too, thanks to a popping soundtrack, live music guest stars and an uplifting score from snappy composer Morgan Kibby.

Landing well-timed joke after joke, from the dumb to the truly sublime, with a Charli XCX call-out simultaneously achieving both, Finding Emily, produced by rom-com titans Working Title, is the sort of feel-good film that will enliven wine nights in for decades to come. Justice for a decent poster, please.

Finding Emily is in cinemas from 21 May.

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