Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice delight as academic opposites in this quick-witted, big-hearted and genuinely youthful-feeling British charmer.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
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Courtesy of Focus Features The big-screen romantic comedy is unfashionable enough these days that it tends to come dressed up in at least one of two ways: with a quasi-absurd high concept (see this summer’s “One Night Only”) or draped in enough ironic quote marks to make clear that the filmmakers are rolling their eyes right along with you. At first glance, “Finding Emily” threatens to do just that. Its heroine, after all, is a college student writing a literal dissertation on the real-world impracticality of romantic attachment; she enters the film quoting Freud (“Love is a state of temporary psychosis”) and calling out manic pixie dreamgirl tropes. Happily, however, director Alicia MacDonald‘s film is both smarter and sweeter than that: smart enough to identify the GenZ sexual politics that make a fool’s errand of the supposedly grand gestures that are the romcom’s stock-in-trade, and sweet enough to know when those gestures work anyway.
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