Finding Emily: Starts Slowly, But Finds Its Way!

“Finding Emily” starts out with a quote from one of my heroes, Sigmund Freud: “Love is a state of temporary psychosis.”  At least in my experience, this statement is false, since it appears that I have a “permanent psychosis,” remaining madly in love with Robin after 32 years of marriage!

Owen (Spike Fearn) is a musician forced to work as a sound engineer at Manchester City College because his band didn’t make it.  He goes to a party where he meets Emily, a pretty young woman who is dressed up as a fairy.  They only spend a few minutes together, but Owen is smitten and “time stands still” for him.  Emily needs to leave the party with her friends, and, in a hurry, she types her cell number for him.  Owen tries to call her the next day, but the number is missing a digit.  He never got her last name, but he had learned from their brief interaction that she is a student at Manchester City.  Convinced that they had an extraordinary connection and that she may be “the one,” he goes on a nearly-impossible mission to find her.  Did she deliberately give him an invalid number because she wasn’t into him and he misconstrued the situation, or was it an honest mistake?  Can he find this pretty “needle in the haystack?”

Emily (a different Emily – Angourie Rice) is a third-year psychology student at the university.  She needs to get into the graduate program in order continue her student visa, or she will have to return to the USA, where she isn’t very happy.  Emily is working on a thesis that romantic love is no longer useful for modern humans, and, since people in love tend to sabotage themselves, humanity would be better off without romance.  Owen winds up meeting her at the college, and, in the search of the right Emily, this different Emily agrees to help him find her.  Secretly, however, she is using Owen as a case study for her thesis on romantic love (assuming he can find the actual Emily) and how their romantic relationship will inevitably lead to his self-sabotaging behavior.  In their search for Owen’s Emily, they wind up spending considerable time together.

Although funny in spots, this film, being marketed as a rom-com, is primarily a drama, with scathing criticism of mob bullying via social media, radical feminism, and the destructiveness of the consciousness of victimhood.  The first 30 minutes of the film was slow and boring, but it gets much better after that, so it’s worth sticking around for.  The acting is good, although I could only understand about 50% of what Owen said due to his thick Manchester, North-English accent.  As an added bonus, the movie has a very good soundtrack with modern rock, Indie, and folk, so I have put it on my Apple Music.

The film will work fine as a rental, but it’s good enough to see on the B.S. if nothing else interests you.  “Finding Emily” isn’t as good a movie as “Amelie” (French Rom-Com from 2001), but it’s fun and has an important message.