by @saidonescottishlady
A map of first love, with all the twist and turns
Finding Emily is the sort of film that reminds you the British rom-com has not so much died as been waiting for the right campus, the right city and the right awkward boy with a guitar to bring it back to life. Directed by Alicia MacDonald, written by Rachel Hirons and produced by Working Title, it arrives with a serious rom-com pedigree — and, pleasingly, enough freshness not to feel embalmed by it.
Set in Manchester, the film follows Owen, played by Spike Fearn, a lovestruck musician who meets a girl called Emily, gets the wrong number for her and sets out to find her. His search leads him to another Emily, played by Angourie Rice, a psychology student with her own ideas about love, attachment and romantic delusion. Minnie Driver brings comic authority in a university-dean role, while the wider ensemble helps create the sense of a campus teetering between youthful sincerity, self-conscious politics and full social-media meltdown.
There is something very Mancunian about the film’s spirit. I kept thinking: this is Manchesterism, if Manchesterism were a rom-com. It has that combination of swagger, sentiment, music, rain-washed romance and slightly chaotic emotional honesty that the city does so well. It is not glossy London fantasy; it is a love story with northern pavements, student-union mythology and just enough grit around the edges to stop it floating away.
Fearn is particularly believable as a romantic lead. Not in the bland, chiselled, algorithm-approved sense, but in the much more useful rom-com sense: you understand why someone might fall for him. He has awkwardness, warmth and a kind of unforced sincerity that makes Owen’s potentially daft mission feel emotionally plausible. Angourie Rice gives Emily intelligence and defensive briskness, and the pleasure of the film is watching those two forms of self-protection slowly give way.
Yes, we can see where the story is probably heading for most of the running time. But that is not a failure; that is almost the contract of a good rom-com. The point is not usually what happens, but how it happens — the missed signals, the reversals, the humiliations, the tiny recognitions. On that front, Finding Emily delivers. It understands that predictability, handled well, can be comforting rather than lazy.
I also liked the way it deals with cancel culture. Owen’s romantic quest — emailing or contacting multiple Emilys in the hope of finding the right one — is funny, but the film is alert to how quickly a grand gesture can be reframed as creepy, intrusive or politically suspect once it hits the campus rumour mill and social media. The film does not entirely sneer at those concerns; it lets the comedy sit in the gap between intention and perception, romance and boundaries, sincerity and performance.
Its legacy may be modest but real: a reminder that British rom-coms can still work when they are rooted somewhere specific, when they take young people seriously without becoming pious, and when they let romance be ridiculous without making it stupid.
As a Manchester graduate who fell in love on those very gardens, I was probably an easy target. But even allowing for that, I found it a trip down memory lane in the best possible way. Finding Emily helped me remember those young flushes of love — the ones that feel embarrassing later, but life-changing at the time. I could not help but love it for that.
Note: Click the pics to go thought to the trailers for each film.
Coat On or Kettle On?
Worth the trip, or worth the wait?
Kettle on.
Not because Finding Emily is undeserving of a cinema audience, but because its real pleasure is not spectacle. It does not need the biggest screen in the room to work its magic. This is a film of tone, warmth, music, memory and feeling — the sort of rom-com you want to stumble across at home, fall for quietly, and then put on again and again whenever you need reminding what young love felt like before you knew how breakable everything was.
So maybe, wait for the small screen. Then enjoy it over and over and over again.
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