Finding Emily

“Love is a state of temporary psychosis,” claims Sigmund Freud, in the opening title card of Finding Emily. Once upon a time, of course, this particular psychosis was less of a temporary presence on our cinema screens and more of a regular feature. But in the streaming era, romcoms are a rare breed; how pleasing, then, to see an unabashed romantic comedy back on the big screen, and a homegrown British one from _Four Weddings And A Funeral_production company Working Title, no less.

This is a sweet little film which makes no bones about following in the tradition of its Richard Curtis-ian forebears, even if it tries to inject a bit of Gen-Z self-awareness and subversion along the way. Our star-cross’d story begins in a Manchester Student Union bar: one night, scruffy music technician Owen (Spike Fearn), with a Stone Roses haircut and a fidgety soft-lad Gallagher swagger, stumbles upon a cute girl named Emily (Sadie Soverall). They enjoy a slow-motion meet-cute, where the world around them seems to fade away, West Side Story-style. They vibe. But then Emily disappears, and though she gives Owen her number, it’s one digit short.

So, Owen sets out on a romantic/obsessive (delete as appropriate) mission to track her down — which is how he bumps into the wrong Emily (Spider-Man’s Angourie Rice), an American psychology student and confirmed romance cynic who believes that love is an act of insanity. Struggling to find a suitable subject for her thesis, she realises that Owen’s desperate mission to find the real Emily might be the perfect case-study of self-sabotage. Thus, a 10 Things I Hate About You-style ‘secret scheme’ is hatched — a classic romcom conceit — in which Emily creates her very own deeply unethical “Stanford prison experiment”, as she puts it, without Owen’s awareness or consent. Or, as her Romcom Best Friend suggests, in the Gen-Z vernacular: “It’s giving illegal.”

It all goes about the way you might expect it to go, with a romance they didn’t realise was happening until it was right in front of them, a love that goes unrequited until it is, inevitably, requited. Plenty of stuff here stretches credulity, even for this genre — are podcasts really blared out on big screens and loudspeakers, live across university campuses, like it’s Times Square in a film about the end of the world? — and there are some fairly broad caricatures of ‘woke’ politics, which slightly undermine a real point the film wants to make.

But the script, by Rachel Hirons, has some strength to it, self-aware enough to reference genre tropes like Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and robust enough to have a genuine narrative debate on earnestness versus cynicism. And it sails by with charm and warmth: Alicia MacDonald’s direction almost feels like a Mancunian take on Rye Lane, colourful and vibrant with music everywhere (shout-out to Nia Archives and Tom Tom Club on the soundtrack); while Rice and Fearn are bright and breezy company, both game for self-effacing comedy and with bags of chemistry between them. For a good romcom, that’s half the battle.