Last week came the news that gen Z are big fans of going to the cinema. Now here is a gen Z romcom from Working Title, the company behind Bridget Jones's Diary and Notting Hill. Directed by Alicia MacDonald from a script by Rachel Hirons, Finding Emily shares DNA with Richard Curtis's comedies, featuring the same warm heart and charm, plus levels of cheesiness that some may find cringe. In the end, it is impossible to hate, though one or two performances lack comic flair.
Plot and Setting
Set in Manchester, indie singer-songwriter Owen (Spike Fearn) meets undergraduate Emily (Sadie Soverall) at the student union. They click, but when Emily taps her number into his phone, she misses a digit. Is it a drunken error, or has she wrong-numbered him? Owen believes it is a mistake and sticks up posters around campus to find her. After a tipoff, he waits outside a lecture hall for psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice). She is American, not his Emily, but she offers to help, suggesting Owen emails every Emily enrolled at the university, all 318 of them. Owen accidentally sends the email to all rather than BCCing, creating an email group of Emilies who are divided in their reactions. Is he a creepy virgin incel, or a diehard romantic? Owen becomes a meme: email guy.
Social Media Satire
Some of the funniest scenes are the reactions on social media after Owen appears on a college YouTube channel with a guitar, playing a song he wrote for Emily. It is like Ed Sheeran on Crimewatch, someone writes. Another coins the hashtag #ratboysummer. This is a gentle, light-touch send-up of campus culture wars and social media pile-ons.
Supporting Characters
Psychology student Emily has an ulterior motive for helping Owen: she wants to use him as a case study for her thesis that being in love is temporary insanity. He is just data, she says, protesting too much. But like in Curtis's films, the supporting characters are the most fun. Prasanna Puwanarajah is very funny as Emily's professor, a celebrity psychologist with a rampant ego. Distractingly, Owen is the spitting image of the young Liam Gallagher, and at certain angles, Rice's Emily resembles Taylor Swift. In a couple of scenes of them together, the effect is plain weird.
Release Details
Finding Emily is out on 21 May in Australia, on 22 May in the UK, and on 28 August in the US.
