Finding Emily (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
1 day ago
5 min read

FINDING EMILY (2026)

Starring Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver, Sadie Soverall, Cora Kirk, Jack Riddiford, Isabella Laughland, Yali Topol Margalith, Kat Ronney, Phil Wang, Timothy Innes, Nadia Parkes, Prasanna Puwanarajah, Amber Grappy, Anthony J. Abraham, Scarlett-Mai Grant, Faye Campbell, Tash Major, Carl Blakeley, Julia Rogers, Trudy Akobeng and Fiona Allen.

Screenplay by Rachel Hirons.

Directed by Alicia MacDonald.

Distributed by Focus Features. 110 minutes. Rated PG-13.

At a certain age, you sometimes think that every romantic connection you make will be THE ONE – the person you could possibly spend your entire life with. Take Owen (Spike Fearn). He is a part-time worker at a University in Manchester, England. One night, while at a campus club, he has a meet-cute with a girl named Emily. Well, kind of cute, he runs into her when she is accompanying her girlfriend when the friend has to use the men’s room because the women’s room is way too crowded.

However, Owen and Emily hit it off and have a great time; dancing, drinking, talking (well as much as they can in the extremely loud club). When Emily’s friends pull her away, saying they are going somewhere else, Owen asks Emily for her number. She quickly programs it into his cell phone. Only when he gets home does he realize that she messed up in giving him the number, missing a digit.

He doesn’t know her last name and has no way to get in touch with her. He also has to consider whether she was knowingly giving him a wrong number as a brush off or whether it was a sincere accident – after all her friends were rushing her. He feels that they had a real connection, so he decides he is going to find her again – even if he looks a little pathetic, or even vaguely creepy, in doing so.

All Owen really knows about her is her first name and where she goes to school. And it turns out that Emily is a surprisingly common name. In fact, there are 318 Emilys in the university. (For comparison’s sake, there are only four Owens.) So he hits the bricks, asking people if they know her, hanging signs around campus, keeping an eye out for his Emily. He even sees her friend at one point, but she doesn’t notice him and disappears as quickly as she appears.

All of which brings up a lot of questions – like at what point does romantic passion cross the line into being stalkerish or even invasive?

It is through this search that Owen meets Emily Raine (Angourie Rice). This Emily is an American exchange student (although Rice is actually Australian) who is working on a thesis about romantic love being a mirage and it makes people victimize themselves chasing an unobtainable dream. In Owen, she sees the ideal subject for her study.

Therefore she agrees to help him find his Emily, all so that she can keep an eye on him and report her findings. They start spending a lot of time together in search of Emily, even becoming friendly, although Owen still does not know he is a subject of an experiment.

You can probably guess where this is going.

Owen’s determination to find Emily – even at the risk of seeming overeager -- hit a little closer to home than I expected. It reminded me of a night decades ago when I found myself in a surprisingly similar situation. I related a bit too well to an early scene where Owen goes to the school and tries to find out Emily’s last name and contact information from a very suspicious school counselor who probably rightly shuts him down flat, refusing to even look into it for him.

Something similar happened to me many years ago. I had been at a bar and ran into a woman who I had met once before when she was dating my friend. She was out with friends after her high school reunion, and I was pretty sure she and my buddy were long over. We ended up having a really terrific night together, but I was a strong believer in the bro code – you don’t hit on your buddy’s exes. So, I didn’t get her last name or number.

I mentioned it to my friend the next time I saw him, and he said it was long over and hadn’t been all that serious. As far as he was concerned, I should feel free. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember her last name or find her number – it was the 90s, after all, when you didn’t have everyone stored in your phone.

Soon after, I happened to be near the school that she went to, and I somehow convinced a skeptical vice principal I wasn’t a crazy stalker, and he eventually let me flip through the yearbook for her year and find her name. Apparently the 90s were a more trusting time. With that info I was able to get a number. Just for the record, since we’ve gone this far down the rabbit hole, we went out a couple of times, but nothing really came of it. About thirty years later I couldn’t even tell you her first name, much less her last.

But at the time, I thought that maybe I had met someone special. That’s exactly the emotional territory the film is playing in. That memory came flooding back as I watched Owen navigate his own mix of hope, awkwardness, and romantic certainty. That’s really the heart of Finding Emily: the belief that one perfect night can justify a leap of faith.

Still, even Owen recognizes that he may not be so much in love with Emily as he is in love with the idea of Emily. In fact, when Emily Raine hears Owen’s description of the first Emily, she refers to her as a standard “manic pixie dream girl.”

Of course, the better she gets to know Owen, the more that she thinks she would prefer to just not find the original Emily and instead get to know him better herself. As Rice told me in a recent interview, “My favorite thing to play is when a character says one thing and is clearly feeling the exact opposite.”

Rice pulls off the conflicting emotional states of her character with charm and grace. There is great chemistry between her buttoned-down character and Fearn’s more antic, impulsive counterpoint, giving the film a sweet tremulous quality. Also standing out in the film are Cora Kirk as Emily Raine’s bestie, Prasanna Puwanarajah as her slightly pompous professor, and Minnie Driver as the university’s frazzled dean.

Watching Finding Emily, I kept thinking of Simon and Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her” – that wistful little deep‑cut about longing and possibility. (And yes, I get that song is awfully old for this film’s target audience.) Maybe it was the name, maybe it was the vibe, but the film taps into the same searching spirit.

Finding Emily understands that longing isn’t just about the person – it’s about the possibility they represent. Alicia MacDonald’s film captures that fragile moment when hope outruns logic, when one night feels like it could change everything. It’s funny, tender, and surprisingly wise about the ways we talk ourselves into – and out of – love. And like that old Simon and Garfunkel tune, it lingers with a gentle ache, reminding us that sometimes the search is the story.

Jay S. Jacobs

https://youtu.be/wc2UjmPzN8c?si=EgDrBcyNU_WqtccN