(courtesy IMP Awards)
Give a genre enough time in the pop culture sun and it will inevitably find itself weighed down with tropes and cliches in abundance which it is expected will be presented and accounted in every story that falls within its grasp.
You can’t escape it – as sure as night follows day, genres will end up as a checklist of elements that must be forensically ticked off lest the true believers have their storytelling enjoyment marred.
The trick then, since ticking those boxes is all but inescapable, is taking the box full of tropes and cliches and making them look shiny and new and somehow original.
Finding Emily is a thoroughly enjoyable example of what that can look like and how romcoms, likely one of the most encrusted with expectations genres out there, can come alive and feel like something you fully and immersively enjoy instead of simply sitting back and watching the usual storytelling element suspects parade on by like old stars treading the boards in an off-off-off-OFF-Broadway show.
In fact, so successfully do writer Rachel Hirons and director Alicia MacDonald execute on their brief that Finding Emily has an effervescent lightness and brightness to it than absolutely marches in buoyant lockstep with its story of young love emerging against all odds in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
It helps proceedings that the stars of the show, Spike Feam, who plays Owen Brompton, the young man searching for the titular Emily, and Angourie Roce, who plays one of over three hundred Emilys on campus at Manchester City University, are so effortlessly delightful, bringing real warmth, emotional vulnerability and bubbling good humour to their key roles.
The title of the film is likely one of the shortest Cliff Notes narrative guides in history.
Finding Emily is literally about finding an Emily in a sea of them; Owen meets eponymous Emily at a university club where he is working as an engineer and in a blindingly short period of time, falls headlong in temporary love with a manic pixie style girl (an projection of all the things men want in a woman as Rice’s Emily later observes) and has to get her number, convinced that all the new colours he is seeing and the sparkling emotions he is feeling must be around for the long haul.
Alas, Emily, whether intentionally or not, gives him a mobile number that’s one digit short, and so Owen, still reeling from the death of his mother a year earlier, and the sale of the family home, manically sets off to find Emily, figuring it can’t be that hard on when he has to come across her at some point on campus.
Reader, it is THAT hard, and in the midst of sticking up posters around the uni and almost getting security set on him by an exasperated admin person, Owen comes across Rice’s Emily who desperately need a subject for her psychology dissertation which is all about how love is a form of debilitating madness.
She offers to help him on his possibly futile quest, but not why she’s doing that, which of course sets us up for the third act falling out which is, of course, re rigeur for any romcom worth its romantic salt but which is handled in Finding Emily with a fun freshness that is proof yet again that here is a romcom movie that won’t just do the same old same old.
The joining of Owen and Emily in a quest to possibly unearth love true love takes place against a social media storm when Owen, at Emily’s self-serving urging, accidentally emails all 318 Emily on campus, setting off a controversy which sees the earnestly sweet and innocent Owen, who very much winningly wears his heart on his sleeve (even when older brother Matt, played by Jack Riddford, gives him heaps for it), decried as some sort of creepy, boundary-crossing Lothario.
In short, what starts off as a sweet mission to find the woman of his dreams, who unsurprisingly turns out not to be that person but in the very best and realistic of ways, becomes an unholy, digitally-amped up mess and Owen’s life ends up looking nothing like the vulnerably lovely young man envisaged.
So, can love be rescued from the this thoroughly unlovely hellhole?
It won’t surprise you to learn that yes, it can be, but the getting there, which involves Emily’s bestie and housemate, Anna (Cora Kirk) and host of other, mainly many, many Emilys, is a long and winding path which also happily involves Owen and Emily realising that maybe they are the ones that each person should be looking for.
Of course, you know precisely where Finding Emily is headed but it has such fun getting there, also aided by a kickass soundtrack that perfectly the storybeats with songs that lyrically and musically work perfectly, and plays around the expected tropes and cliches so engagingly and with such freshness and originality, that you’re more than happy to go along to the very much expected destination.
Finding Emily is one of those romcoms that actually feels like falling in love, and while as a cinemagoer you haven’t fallen in love yourself, you sure as hell feel as if you have leaving the film, a lightness and buoyancy filling your weighted down soul and more than a little heart-lightening pep in your now-springy step.
And honestly isn’t that why we watch romcoms?
We want to feel an escapist lightness, a sense of hopefulness and romantic purpose, as if all the darkness and loneliness around us can be vanquished with extreme happy prejudice and life can come alive again in all kinds of never-before-seen colours.
Finding Emily is a romcom that absolutely delivers on that, serving up characters you want to root for, and then some, a story that is just the right balance between heartfelt vulnerability and comedically romantic zestfulness and a sense of encompassing fizzy possibility that is delivered with all the all tropes and cliches you demand and expect but with a freshness that makes you fall in love with love all over again.