Finding Emily finds plenty of Emilys but not its own identity as a rom-com

There could have easily been a pointed commentary here about the pitfalls of modern love, rife as it is with parasocial projection and demeaning situationships, but Finding Emily chooses instead to lampoon, of all things, how knee-jerk reactions from feminists might unduly mischaracterize a nice guy. In relation to the email scandal, wherein over 300 MCU students named Emily receive a message from Owen, one such recipient begins a campus-wide movement to condemn what she considers a breach of security. This Emily (Kat Ronney) has brightly-dyed hair, dresses like she’s in a Bikini Kill cover band, and takes it upon herself to start a Take Back The Night-style protest in order to condemn the anonymous “email guy” as a potential predator. Her character exists to be the butt of a joke, the target of misogynistic jocks and the callous Dean (Minnie Driver) who, despite being too young, claims to have “burned her bras” as a young feminist.

But Riot Grrrl Emily isn’t the only one who, in the film’s eyes, takes women’s rights too far. After our main Emily gets hit in the mouth by a rando during a concert, a drunk woman sees her bloody lip and squares up to deck Owen, believing him to be a domestic abuser. In another scene, a podcast host does everything in her power to frame Owen as a creepy incel. Had Finding Emily fleshed out Owen’s faults a bit more—demonstrating that it really is super weird of him to go about finding his crush this way—the film’s comedic streak would have been more defined, juxtaposing his manic pursuit with straightwoman Emily’s psychoanalytical perspective. Instead, the gags come from women being over-eager to catch a predator, unable to rationalize that the guy they’re accosting is actually a harmless lovefool, which makes the tone feel bleakly regressive.

Finding Emily clearly wants to situate itself in a bygone era of rom-coms, evinced by anecdotes about Owen’s lost love being “too cool for social media” and needledrops that lean more New Wave than new. But what made those earlier films successful was distinctive characters and palpable on-screen chemistry. Fearn admittedly does a bit more here (his body language, including a penchant for neck nuzzling, is the dreamiest part of the film), but neither Owen nor Emily are given the room to ardently express their passions. The most we get are sob stories about dead/estranged mothers, which are so narratively similar that it’s weird not to make more of a point of it. If we don’t gain any insight into the protagonist’s inner lives, how can we root for them to declare a love that feels hollow?

For a film that argues that we don’t take the time to appreciate people’s nuances—from those we’ve just met to those we’ve known our whole lives—it’s odd that its central characters are given little more to distinguish themselves than a thick Manchester accent and an ill-conceived finger tattoo. Even Manchester itself feels hollow in its presentation, a shame considering one of the film’s most charming scenes involves a bar crawl through the queer nightlife quarter, which is replete with deliciously bitchy non-binary bartenders. Otherwise void of convincing characters converging in a specific time and place, Finding Emily is utterly lost searching for itself. 

Director: Alicia MacDonald
Writer: Rachel Hirons
Starring: Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver
Release Date: September 4, 2026