by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver, Prasanna Puwanarajah
Intro:
… there’s a winning earnestness radiating from its lead performers that smooths over the potentially-unintentional discomfort, tired rom-com tropes, and occasionally eye-rolling soundtrack.
Within the thorny and often heart-spilling sphere that is our relationship with the very idea of relationships, there are few things that sting worse than knowing just how close you may have gotten to finding ‘the one’. “We all have soulmates but we walk past them every day”, as Nick Hornby and Ben Folds once put it in ‘From Above’.
Finding Emily is the story of Mancunian lad Owen (Spike Fearn), who experiences love at first sight with uni student Emily, only to discover that the phone number he asked her for is missing a digit. The number is the only thing that he has of hers, not even a last name. Just from that premise, there’s a wealth of potential in making the audience squirm in sympathy at the sizeable gap that a single number can create between two people, and it’s one that the film makes ample use of. Arguably a bit too much.
As the camera follows Owen’s various hair-brained attempts to find this mystery Emily, from emails to podcasts to an unfortunate attempt at cosplaying The Stig, the film establishes him as a hopeless romantic who is so genuine as to be difficult to believe; both for the film’s own world and for the viewers watching the cringe unfold.
Writer Rachel Hirons, who showed aptitude with digestible social cringe with her breakout feature A Guide to Second Date Sex, frames Owen’s trials as a struggle between idealism and cynicism over the idea of ‘true love’ – Owen as the wide-eyed dreamer, and psych student Emily (a different Emily, it’s a whole thing…) played by Angourie Rice as the clinical mind that sees romantic feelings as a sign of madness. It’s a Working Title production, so naturally there’s a few clichés to push through.
However, in trying to get across that struggle – of being genuine and open about one’s want for human connection – the film’s attempts to be holistic in presenting all of the sociocultural context around Owen’s actions occasionally veers from watchable cringe to “oh dear” cringe. Hirons’ dialogue examines Owen’s predicament and the possible reasons for it, from getting purposely wrong-numbered, to his own assumptions about the instant connection, to plausible fears that he could just be one of far too many men who think invasion of privacy is romantic and not, y’know, creepy as hell.
This is where the casting becomes vital. Spike Fearn’s portrayal of deep-seated neuroses in Ella McCay was so good as to practically steal the show from its own title character, and he applies that same skill here to even greater effect. Without his consistently charming and disarming presence on-screen, the film’s claims about how pure and innocent he is would just be empty pretence. But his performance as the scally who wears his heart on his tracksuit sleeve makes it all work, presenting a genuinely good guy who just wants his chance to be happy with someone, even if it is a long shot. As grounded as the worries around his behaviour are, he focuses the film’s core message about how jaded the modern world has become, and how those same attitudes could be shutting us all off from genuine connection. To quote an old meme (as the film itself does), he is cringe, but he is free. Maybe we could all afford to embarrass ourselves more.
Finding Emily hits turbulence in its exploration of finding love in the modern day, but there’s a winning earnestness radiating from its lead performers that smooths over the potentially-unintentional discomfort, tired rom-com tropes (the entire third act might be the weakest part of this whole film purely on that basis), and occasionally eye-rolling soundtrack. It’s a film about the difficulties in being upfront romantically that effectively conveys the reasons behind those difficulties, but also why giving into the craziness of the heart can be the start of true liberation. Putting yourself out there, cringe and all, is a scary thing to do… but it only takes one other person doing the same to make it all worth it.
