Finding Emily’s review – a heartwarming gen Z campus romcom that’s impossible to hate | Video

LDuring the week, there was news that gen Z likes to go to the cinema. Now here’s a gen Z romcom from Working Title, the company behind Bridget Jones Diary and Notting Hill. Directed by Alicia MacDonald from a voice by Rachel Hirons, Finding Emily shares the DNA and humor of Richard Curtis – the same warm heart and charm, plus a level of sophistication that others may experience. In the end I found it impossible to hate, even though one or two scenes were very unpleasant.

It has been established Manchesterwhere Owen (Spike Fearn) meets Emily (Sadie Soverall) at the student club. She clicks, but when Emily enters her number into her phone, she misses the numbers. Is it drunk, or did you misread him? Owen believes it’s a mistake and puts up signs around the school to find him. After speaking, he waits outside the lecture hall for psychology student Emily (Angourie Rice). He’s American, not his Emily, but he offers to help her, and makes Owen Emily’s emails to every one of the university’s registrants – all 318 of them. Owen accidentally sends an email to everyone instead of BCCing, creating an email group of Emilies who are divided in their activities. Is she some kind of ugly “incel” virgin? Or dead love? Owen becomes a meme: “email man”.

One of the funniest scenes is the scene on television when Owen appears on a college YouTube channel with a guitar playing a song he wrote for Emily. “It’s like Ed Sheeran on Crimewatch,” one wrote. Someone sells the hashtag #ratboysummer. This is a gentle, lighthearted send-up of the school culture wars and social media pile-ups.

Instead, psychology student Emily has another goal to help Owen: she wants to use him as a lesson in her idea that being in love is temporary insanity. “He’s just data,” he says, sounding dismissive. But, as in Curtis’ films, the supporting characters are very interesting. Prasanna Puwanarajah is very funny as Emily’s professor, a very arrogant psychologist. Paradoxically, Owen is the spitting image of a young Liam Gallagher and at other angles, Rice’s Emily is the dead singer Taylor Swift. In several pictures of them together, the effect is unusual.