Finding Emily (2026)
There is a particular pleasure in watching a genre rediscover its own appetite. The romantic comedy has spent much of the past decade either apologising for itself or drowning in self-referential irony, so Finding Emily arrives with something almost radical: confidence. It knows exactly what it wants to be and has dispensed with the apologetic irony that has plagued the genre for most of the past decade.
Owen (Spike Fearn) is a struggling musician working as a sound engineer at the student union bar of a Manchester university. One night at a crowded dance, he meets a young woman, Emily, and comes away with a phone number that turns out to be one digit short. A philosophically resilient person might take the hint. Owen is not that person. Grief-stricken by recent family loss and constitutionally incapable of letting things go, he launches a campus-wide search for a woman he spoke to for a matter of minutes. Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), a psychology student, agrees to help, and is using Owen, without his knowledge, as the live case study for her dissertation on romantic love as a form of temporary psychosis.
Rachel Hirons’s screenplay mines genuine comedy from the gap between Owen’s earnestness and the increasingly baroque consequences of his quest. The pivot on which the second act turns is a mass email sent to every Emily on campus, dispatched, with touching naivety, without blind carbon copy. The resulting social media storm raises a question the film has the intelligence not to answer too quickly: is Owen a romantic dreamer or a creep? The Manchester setting, filmed with real affection for the city, adds texture; the university campus becomes a closed world of gossip, ambition, and accumulated embarrassment, which suits a film whose comedy depends on information travelling faster than anyone intended.
Fearn is a considerable find. His Owen is endearingly inarticulate, perpetually a step behind events, and genuinely astonished each time a decision produces a result. The performance earns its sympathy rather than assuming it. Rice, adopting an American accent with admirable precision, is compelling as the sharper of the two leads, though the screenplay occasionally asks her to carry scenes that ought to distribute their weight more evenly. Minnie Driver, in a supporting role presumably designed to supply adult perspective, does what Minnie Driver has always done: arrive, take complete possession of her scene, and leave the other actors looking slightly underprepared.
The soundtrack, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Carly Rae Jepsen, is deployed with real intelligence, functioning less as wallpaper than as emotional shorthand for a generation that has more words for algorithms than for heartbreak.
The film loses its nerve, in my view, in its final third. The messy ethical knot at the centre of Emily Raine’s dissertation project, her covert use of Owen as a case study, without his knowledge or consent, deserves harder treatment than it receives. A couple of supporting characters are resolved more tidily than their complexity warrants. The genre demands resolution, certainly, but resolution is not the same as absolution, and Finding Emily conflates them, and does so with a speed that forecloses the discomfort it has spent two acts earning.
Working Title Films, the production house behind Notting Hill and Bridget Jones, has form in this territory, and the pedigree is visible. Alicia MacDonald, making her feature directorial debut, demonstrates a genuine talent for anchoring sentiment in specific, grounded detail, which keeps the film’s sentiment from curdling into the generic warmth that Working Title’s less successful productions mistake for charm.
Finding Emily is, in the end, precisely what it sets out to be: generous, frequently funny, occasionally sharp, and willing to raise questions it is not always willing to answer. A critic could fault it for that reticence; I am inclined to, though the film’s pleasures are substantial enough that the objection sits lightly.