Finding Emily Review: This Misjudged Rom-Com Is Almost Impossible To Root For

Universal Pictures

RATING : 4 / 10

Romantic comedies have gotten a lot more manipulative in 2026, to the extent that it feels like filmmakers are unconsciously trying to one-up each other to see how far characters can go before audiences stop rooting for them. First there was the sun-kissed romance “You, Me & Tuscany,” where the central relationship blossomed out of the female lead breaking into a one-night’s stand gorgeous Italian villa. Then there was “Voicemails for Isabelle,” where the meet-cute was a man listening to the voicemails a woman was leaving to her dead sister, who had the cell number that was reassigned to him. It all makes the central couple in “The Drama” (which Looper also reviewed) look like the year’s most stable pairing.

A box office flop in the U.K. earlier this year, “Finding Emily” arrives stateside at a time when audiences starved of romcoms are proving resistant to this year’s slate of high concepts and misjudged meet-cutes arriving in theaters; “The Drama” has succeeded where others have failed seemingly for being upfront and self-aware about the characters’ dubious morality. Forced narrative mechanics like a dystopia where single people can only have sex one night a year are being shrugged off, presumably because the elaborate nature of that alternate reality is far more interesting to explore than any conventional romance you can throw into it. 

The same is true to a lesser degree in director Alicia MacDonald’s “Finding Emily.” It’s built around a psychology major named Emily Raine (Angourie Rice) preparing a thesis paper on the self-destructive nature of love, as she manipulates a case study — Owen (Spike Fearn), who doesn’t realize he’s being used — into publicly embarrassing himself.

Universal Pictures

“Finding Emily” has charmed British critics, but for me, it presented far too many emotional obstacles to root for this central pair to wind up together. Many of the most beloved romantic comedies depict love blossoming between couples who are hiding secrets from each other, but Emily’s manipulation of a likable albeit dim-witted young man had me hoping for the opposite — for him to realize the predicament she’s forced him into, and to run for the hills before she could drag his name further into the mud. It all starts when Owen meets a different Emily (Sadie Soverall) on a nightclub dance floor but doesn’t get her correct number. While putting posters up across the Manchester City University campus to find her, he meets Angourie Rice’s American exchange student Emily, who sees him as a potential thesis guinea pig.

Before long, he’s public enemy number one after being encouraged to email every Emily in the college database, which has him painted a threat to women, who now see him as someone who couldn’t get the hint that the elusive Emily didn’t want to give him her number. Meanwhile, his every conversation is still being recorded for a project he hasn’t been told about, and he’s nudged toward bigger public embarrassments to try and find the missing girl. As Rice’s Emily discovers she has a romantic interest in Owen, it feels less like a logical conclusion to the story and more like the biggest mistake he could make looming in the distance. If the movie were more attuned to the dark nature of the premise, it could have worked as a black comedy, but it aspires to be a classic Richard Curtis romcom, with Spike Fearn’s protagonist operating as a working-class equivalent to the many lovesick leads in his movies. He just sounds more like Liam Gallagher than Hugh Grant.

Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons have an earnest affection for the post-“Four Weddings” wave of British romcoms, but there’s an awkwardness to how they apply well-worn genre tropes to a story which doesn’t neatly support them. Suspension of disbelief is required in many of the movies that inspired “Finding Emily,” but there’s a bigger leap of faith required here than with, say, Hugh Grant’s bookshop owner meeting and falling for Julia Roberts’ Hollywood A-lister in “Notting Hill.”

Universal Pictures

It’s not that Emily and Owen come from entirely different worlds and their paths could never realistically cross. The troubling set of circumstances that initially bind them together would be too much of a hurdle for a romance to overcome; a Stockholm Syndrome situation is the only way it’s palpable. We come to romcoms for escapist fantasy, to shut off our brains and witness the simple pleasure of two charming leads falling in love, but love doesn’t feel like a triumph so much as a bitter pill to swallow here considering everything that came before Emily’s third-act realization.

None of this is Angourie Rice or Spike Fearn’s fault, as this mismatched couple has brief glimpses of chemistry that almost manage to sell the preposterous nature of the material. But ultimately, they can’t win over any of my rational thoughts that such a romance would be even more unethical than anything that came before it. It’s a shame, as Rice has proven herself a consistently charming performer since holding her own as Ryan Gosling’s quick-witted daughter in “The Nice Guys” 10 years ago but hasn’t had the substantial vehicle needed to level up from promising child star to charismatic lead. A darker variation on this same premise could have helped her recapture the spark of that breakout role on a much grander level.

Fearn is in a strange spot where he’s cast frequently as an awkward love interest, but despite doing the best to bring charm to uneven material, he never quite demonstrates why he’s currently being typecast in this way. “Finding Emily” is at least a better outlet for him in this regard than “Ella McCay,” where he played the titular governor’s awkward agoraphobic brother. (Although, both movies do share the common trait of being populated by characters who think and act like aliens who have just landed on Earth trying their best to mimic human behavior.)

Viewing “Finding Emily” in that light is the only way to justify one of the most cynical meet cutes in recent memory, one arguably even more manipulative than “Voicemails for Isabelle,” building toward the triumphant finale that a lifetime of romance tropes has primed us to expect. It’s rare to root for a couple to split up before they’ve even gotten together, but “Finding Emily” never gives us a reason to want this relationship to work out.

“Finding Emily” premieres in theaters on August 28.