REVIEW: Finding Emily proves weirdly enjoyable

Directed by Alicia MacDonald from a script by Rachel Hirons, Finding Emily plonks itself firmly at the strange and rather disturbing end of the romcom spectrum. At least to start with.

In the end it wins you over nicely, proving both enjoyably weird and weirdly enjoyable – the tale of Manchester would-be singer-songwriter Owen (Spike Fearn) who is working as a sound technician at the university.

There he meets undergraduate Emily (Sadie Soverall) at the student union – and they seem to connect. So much so that he asks her for her phone number as they part. The trouble is she writes it down with one digit missing. Knowing only her first name, he goes public with posters in his search for her.

Taking it all to the next level, psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice) latches on to him – and provides him (rather oddly) with the email addresses of all the 318 Emilies at the university. Slightly dippily he emails them all openly and at once.

Within hours he is “email guy”, going viral as the campus ponders whether he is “sexy pest” or “sex pest.”

It’s a rather frightening illustration of just how quickly the online world can spiral out of everyone’s control. In fact, of just how little we control the online world at all. Owen is quickly seen as a “psychotic” sex predator – against which we are weighing up the way he actually comes across: a really sweet and naïve guy who is disarmingly honest in everything he says. Or is he? You start to wonder as the film plunges into murky waters.

Is the untraceable Emily actually the victim in all this? Did she deliberately “wrong-number” him just to get rid of him? Even more intriguingly, since when has “wrong-number” been a verb?

Even murkier though is psychology student Emily who has got her own agenda. For her, poor Owen is just data as she tries to plough through her rather implausible dissertation in which she is wanting to argue that emotional attachments are actually just messy and self-defeating self-sabotage. The trouble for Emily is that, even as she horribly betrays Owen by pretending to befriend him, she’s busily proving herself wrong – by falling for him. And in the process showing that actually, she’s not all bad.

Finding Emily is a strange, convoluted and contrived kind of film, but you can’t help falling for it in the end. It’s nicely played – and there’s actually something rather endearing about the characters for all their flaws. Which is presumably precisely the point.

One big drawback though is Emily’s psychology professor – one of the most irritating characters ever to have appeared on the big screen. A big misjudgement there.