Finding Emily

Finding Emily is a pleasant, harmless, and entirely average British romcom that does nothing wrong and nothing especially right. Working Title, Manchester, two charming leads, a funny enough premise. It is the kind of film that exists, plays nicely, and is forgotten by the following week.

Owen, a sound engineer at a student union bar, meets a girl one night and falls immediately in love with her. She gives him her number. She writes one digit wrong. He sets about finding every Emily at the university to track her down. He stumbles into Emily Raine, an American psychology student who decides he is the perfect subject for her thesis on love as a form of madness. They pretend to be friends. They fall for each other. You know where this is going.

The plot mechanics are clean and the setup is genuinely clever. A man looking for one Emily while falling for another, with a student union president named Emily Thewlis running a feminist campaign against the "Email Guy" who mass-emailed every Emily on campus. There is good material here. The film uses some of it and leaves the rest on the table.

The Two Leads

Angourie Rice is the best thing in the film. She is warm and sharp and completely believable, and she has the specific quality that the best romcom leads have, which is that you root for her even when she is doing something wrong. Spike Fearn as Owen is charming and likeable without being particularly memorable. Their chemistry works well enough to carry the film through its slower stretches, which is ultimately what a romcom needs more than anything else.

The Richard Curtis Problem

Finding Emily has been compared to Richard Curtis's romcoms and that comparison is accurate in one way and unflattering in another. It has the warm heart and the Manchester charm and the ensemble of likeable side characters. What it does not have is a single scene with the wit or the emotional precision of the best Curtis moments. It goes through the motions of a great British romcom without quite becoming one.

The final third loses its energy. The misunderstanding that keeps the two leads apart is resolved too quickly and too neatly. A viral song subplot that goes nowhere. The thesis defense scene runs long. By the time the ending arrives it feels earned but not surprising, which is the minimum requirement for the genre rather than an achievement within it.

Not Bad. Just Average.

Finding Emily is not a bad film. It is a comfortable, well-made, occasionally funny British romcom that does exactly what it sets out to do. If that is what you are looking for on a Sunday evening it will deliver. It just will not stay with you.