‘Finding Emily’ Review: Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn Can’t Conjure Enough Sparks to Save This Rom-Com From Its Toxic Premise

The problem with Finding Emily is not that no one in it acts like a real and reasonable human being, although no one does — not its exhaustingly lovelorn hero ( Spike Fearn ‘s Owen), nor its acridly skeptical heroine ( Angourie Rice ‘s Emily), nor any of the screeching over-reactors and thoughtless under-reactors surrounding them. Absurd behavior is, after all, a cornerstone of the rom-com genre; if you didn’t want to believe in a world where the path to true love cuts through harebrained fake dating schemes or HR-nightmare jobs that require getting dumped , you’d watch something else. Related Stories Movies Angourie Rice-Spike Fearn Rom-Com 'Finding Emily' Lands Summer Release From Focus (Exclusive) TV Jennifer Garner Once Bit a Chunk Out of An Actor's Ear During a Fight Scene: "Like Mike Tyson"

No, the problem with Finding Emily is that it’s so busy reassuring you how delightful it is that none of its characters act like real and reasonable human beings that it forgets to conjure the necessary magic to make you love them anyway. Lacking not just in sense but charm and chemistry to boot, this would-be defense of rom-com tropes against our jaded age ends up, instead, far more cynical than any of the criticisms it’s supposedly fighting against. Finding Emily The Bottom Line A self-serving experiment with unsatisfying results. Release date: Friday, Aug. 28 Cast: Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Cora Kirk, Jack Riddiford, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Timothy Innes, Isabella Laughland, Minnie Driver Director: Alicia MacDonald Screenwriter: Rachel Hirons Rated PG-13, 1 hour 51 minutes

Director Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons’ self-awareness is apparent from the opening scene, an utterly classic meet-cute. At a party one night, struggling musician Owen strikes a connection with a young woman (Sadie Soverall) that feels downright magical — she’s even dressed as a fairy, emphasizing the dreaminess of the moment. In the cold light of day, however, Owen discovers his happy ending is further away than he might have hoped. The number she’s left him with is one digit short, making a follow-up text impossible.

But Owen, a romantic so starry-eyed that Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother would have advised him to chill, is not so easily deterred. Knowing nothing about his fantasy woman beyond her first name (Emily) and her school (Manchester City University, where he works as a sound engineer), he mounts a no-holds-barred campaign to track her down, pestering the school secretary for contact information and then papering the entire campus with wanted posters when that fails.

This is, to put it plainly, kinda creepy behavior, and initially it seems to be to the film’s credit that it recognizes this. Finding Emily presents itself as a rom-com that doubles as a thought exercise in how genre tropes like nice guys and manic pixie dream girls play in the era of Obsession and Companion , Couch Guy and West Elm Caleb , think pieces about incels and rape culture and toxic masculinity.