Finding Emily review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 08.28.26
★★★★ 4 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Finding Emily happily revives the classic romantic-comedy engine in which a young man searches everywhere for the woman he thinks he wants while failing to notice the one beside him. A missing digit in a phone number leads Owen into a campus-wide, privacy-destroying hunt involving every Emily at his university, with Angourie Rice joining the chaos as a psychology researcher. The destination is never mysterious, nor should it be. Spike Fearn and Rice are charming enough to make getting there the pleasure, and the movie’s unapologetic sincerity reminded me how much I miss this kind of rom-com.
Full review — contains spoilers
This is a straightforward romantic comedy and it doesn’t try to be anything else. Boy meets girl and spends most of the movie failing to notice which girl he’s actually supposed to end up with. Spike Fearn plays Owen, a dopey young guy working around a university. He goes out, meets the girl of his dreams at a loud party, and hits it off with her before her friends start dragging her somewhere else, so she gives him her number on the way out the door. The next morning he wakes up and the number is missing a digit. He knows her name is Emily. That’s all he’s got.
So the first stretch is him trying to find her. He tries different numbers. He puts up signs. Eventually he finds a way to get access to the university email records and decides he’ll write every Emily at the school, and instead of BCCing them he CCs them. Now every Emily on campus has every other Emily’s address, all of them have been conscripted into one idiot’s search for a woman he met once, and he has accidentally started a mass group conversation he cannot shut down.
It goes about how you’d expect from there. The search follows him around campus. There’s the privacy problem, there’s the humiliation, and it starts eating into his life and his career, because now everybody knows exactly who he is and what he did.
Somewhere in there he meets another Emily, Emily Raine, played by Angourie Rice, a psychology researcher who takes up his cause partly because she can get research out of it. She starts helping him look. I’m not giving anything away by telling you the movie begins nudging at something between Owen and the Emily standing right next to him while he hunts for the other one.
That’s the movie, and that’s fine, because that’s what I came for. You know where it’s going. Watching them get there is the point.
Fearn and Rice are charming together and I had a good time with this. It doesn’t need to reinvent the romantic comedy. That’s not what I wanted from it anyway. If you like rom-coms at all, this is a good one. I’m glad to see the genre isn’t dead just yet.