★★½ (2½ out of 4)
Remember those bracing Brit romcoms from Richard Curtis like “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Love, Actually” and the “Bridget Jones” franchise? Well, “Finding Emily” remembers them, too. OK, it can’t quite measure up, but it seems churlish not to appreciate the effort. And Working Title Films, who gave us those winners, has stepped up to present “Finding Emily” as well. That’s pedigree, and it counts.
First-time director Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hiron put just enough of a Gen Z spin on “Finding Emily” to cut their own path through well-worn ground. As one character says in a line worth repeating, “True freedom in this life is knowing you’re cringe and doing it anyway.”
The Zoomer versions of Hugh Grant and Renne Zellweger lined up for “Finding Emily” are Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice, two off-center dazzlers who can charm their way past any bumps in the storytelling and absurdity of plot. These are not insubstantial obstacles.
Sharply hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt. One caveat: I didn’t believe a word of it.
Set in Manchester, shot in all its gray glory by Rachel Clark, the film pivots around Fearn, 26, as Owen Brompton, a sound techie and wannabe musician, who’s at a Manchester Student Union bar and falling hard for college student Emily, an angel (she’s wearing wings) played by Sadie Soverall. She gives Owen her number, but it’s one digit short. His dumbass game plan is to put up flyers and run around campus randomly calling out the name Emily. Kudos to Fearn, who you might have spotted in the James L. Brooks political fiasco “Ella McCay,” if you or anyone had bothered to see how solid he was in it. No matter. Somehow Fearn makes Owen an appealingly soft lad with mostly hidden virtues.
Owen attracts the attention of another girl named Emily—psychology student Emily Raine (that’s Rice) who offers to help him track down the elusive object of his affection. Owen doesn’t do lust. Is this Emily the equal to Owen in pie-eyed idiocy? Hardly. This Emily has her own agenda and it’s a calculating one. She’s doing a dissertation on the futility of romantic love. And though Owen doesn’t know it, she has him in mind as Exhibit A.
Like I told you, the plot makes no sense. But Rice sure does, despite Emily’s not-at-all endearing ease with deception. She unkindly refers to Owen to her friends as, “my very own Stanford Prison Experiment.” Why don’t we hate her, pity-trash Owen and bolt for the exit in frustration? They used to call it chemistry, and whatever chemistry is Rice and Fearn have it.
A word about Rice. She’s 25 and the Aussie breakout who played Betty Brant in three Spider-Man films with Tom Holland and earned her TV stripes on “Black Mirror,’ “Mare of Easttown” and “The Last Thing He Told Me.” Here she inhabits the Emily role and turns our hisses into a freakish kind of understanding about how and why opposites attract.
Rice’s Emily puts Owen up to mass emailing every Emily on campus—there’ s 318 of them—until he becomes a meme of a stalker known as the “toxic virgin.” Owen claims he’s not a virgin, which is clearly missing the point. He’s obsessive, she’s mean, and together they’re a critique about incel baiting and cancel culture reflecting the Tik-Tok-ization of relationships that skips the human element.
Thankfully, the human element is precisely what Rice and Feran supply in ways sharply hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt. One caveat: I didn’t believe a word of it.