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By Leah Read.
Set in Manchester, Finding Emily is a romantic comedy, directed by Alicia MacDonald and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Olivier Kaempfer with supporting performances from Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice. The narrative follows a character called Owen, a lovestruck musician who accidentally gets a phone number with a missing digit from a girl Emily that he likes. He decides to enlist the help of an American psychology student who is also called Emily, but little does Owen know, this Emily secretly uses his ongoing search as part of her case study for her thesis based on “the madness of romantic obsession”.
The film explores themes of modern romance, the MeToo climate and the divide of creepy vs romantic paradox. The MeToo movement serves as a framing device for a campus wide satire by challenging the trope of a lovesick romantic. The film incorporates old fashioned romantic gestures i.e. the lead character Owen, tracking down a crush after receiving the wrong phone number, against the contemporary safety standards and consent culture.
The film’s visuals, utilize the setting to give the narrative a youthful and energetic identity with recognisable locations such as Piccadilly Records, Naysmith Street in Cheetham Hill and the University of Manchester campus. The movie acts as a love letter to the city’s rich musical heritage. The cinematography created by Rachel Clark leans into a documentary like style using a handheld camera. Also, the colour palette has a more grounded, distinctive, aesthetic with soft blues and green tones to reflect off the rainy, northern environment of Manchester and create an authentic mood. The music in this film combines modern pop and dance perfectly emulates student life and the chaos of dating alongside the jagged upbeat tracks with contemporary dance and pop.
For me, Spike Fearn’s performance is considered the beating heart of the film. He gets highly praised for his grounded and charismatic performance, portraying the hopeless romantic character Owen who represents a man grappling with vulnerability and the social norm shift of romance in the gen z era. He is great at balancing both chaotic energy with genuine sincerity. However, Angourie Rice delivers a performance of grounded emotional vulnerability with cynical intellect this is shown through her capturing the cynical intellect through the anxieties of a Gen z audience by highlighting a generation that struggles to balance the desire for a genuine connection with the fear of being perceived as cringe.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the film as the story was clear to understand and easy to follow, also the fact that it was filmed and set in Manchester generates a unique thrill as it is a location well recognised. I would recommend that if you’ve not seen Finding Emily yet to go see this at your local or nearby cinemas as it has a blended mixture of romance, chaos and nostalgia.
