Off the back of a great chat with a beautiful girl called Emily at his work, the local student union, he’s left with nothing but a first name and her uni – the fictional Manchester City University – to go on.
From there, he sets out with the best intentions and (very straightforwardly) marches up to her campus in search of any Emily he can find.
Along the way, he runs into Emily Raine, the first of many red herrings on his quest, and together, the pair join forces to find the right girl. He’s hoping to find true love; she’s analysing his every move in the hopes of handing in a show-stopping psychology dissertation with Owen as the unsuspecting guinea pig.
‘You gave me 10/11ths of your number. We met on Monday night. You were a fairy.’
Sometimes first meetings don’t always go to plan. Sometimes, you make a connection with a girl when you’re out at the club, get her number and find there’s a digit missing somewhere, impossible to figure out.
That might even have happened to you. What sets Owen Brompton, the lovesick protagonist of British student rom-com Finding Emily, apart from the crowd is the quirkiness of his methodology.
That’s a good set-up for a rom-com if ever I heard one, and I’d been looking forward to checking this film out ever since the first trailer.
The marketing has spoiled a few twists and turns that I might otherwise have liked to have gone in blind for, so I’ll stay away from too many specific plot details.
Suffice to say that obstacles arise in the ongoing hunt for the right Emily (among hundreds at MCU) and before long, both leads find themselves in over their heads in different ways. Their pitfalls are usually funny, too – there were a few laugh-out-loud moments, at least from me. While it’s not uncommon to go through a comedy with some light, polite tittering, I did find myself chuckling more than I’d expected to.
Owen’s ongoing search rides the line between hopeless romanticism and downright stalking. Historically, such things are common in movie romances (my favourite film of all time, Tim Burton’s Big Fish, sees a rejected Ewan McGregor plant hundreds of daffodils on his love’s doorstep in the hopes of changing her mind – and it actually works).
But the film’s dissection of the duality inherent in that trope is one of its core themes. It constantly begs the question of ‘How far is too far?’ in an interesting way, and different characters within the university have differing opinions on the matter.
In the wrong hands, he could easily have been a slimy, untrustworthy protagonist (the kind that you do find in rom-coms, at times, usually the ones lining the bottom shelf of charity shop DVD sections) but main man Spike Fearn lends such a strong sense of Mancunian, working class earnestness to Owen that you never once feel able to falter from his side.
He’s honest in his awkwardness, and though he’s more than a little hapless when it comes to women, he’s easy to like.
Aussie actor Angourie Rice co-stars as Raine. She’s had starring roles in the past – in 2024’s musical Mean Girls remake, and in Honor Society, which involved some subterfuge of its own, with Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo as her mark. I know her best as the most recent incarnation of Betty Brant in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man films. Here, she’s swapped out one MCU for another as a faithful, frantic student at Manchester Uni. I haven’t seen much of her work, but from what I’ve yet to be disappointed by her performance in something, and that duck is not broken in Finding Emily. She toes the line between adorable and damn-near evil nicely, her character integral to the thematic heart of the movie as she tries to do whatever it takes to secure a post-grad and avoid a one-way flight back home to Iowa. Her rapport with Owen works well, too, with each seeming selfless act on the hunt for Emily secretly stemming from her own selfish designs, something that the film’s narrative addresses with some weight rather than purely stereotypical rom-com froth.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a healthy dose of your typical genre trappings in amongst the rest of the film’s elements, though. While its core dynamic is far and away the most compelling part of the film, attempts to flesh out Owen and Raine’s social circles fall somewhat flat. She’s got her own baggage, which includes a floundering situationship with a cookie-cutter heartthrob and a close bond with her straight-talking flatmate who feels like a character I’ve seen in a hundred ‘quirky’ romance flicks. Owen lives with his older brother, and both he and his partner feel like inconsequential contributions to the story. While the film aims high with a subplot about the brotherly bonds and moving on from the troubles of the past, this gesture feels rather tangential. It’s a sweet enough arc, but it never really aligns with what the rest of the film is trying to do and say.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this one, though. It’s one of the better rom-coms of this year so far, and I appreciated the Manchester setting as opposed to somewhere a bit more hackneyed like London, especially with one of the central characters being a starry-eyed American student who could all too easily have wound up studying at Kings College instead. Owen, too, is a fantastic protagonist and the fact that he looks like either half of an Oasis tribute act pays nice dividends come the credits.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate sex references, drug references, infrequent strong language.
Finding Emily is in cinemas now.
