Finding Emily (2026)
The romantic comedy is making a slow comeback in the past year or so, and fans of the genre should check out director Alicia MacDonald's new rom-com Finding Emily.
Owen (Spike Fearn, who was in last year's criminally underrated Ella McCay) is an awkward sound engineer who has a dance and flirty conversation with a young woman named Emily at a live music show. Leaving in a hurry with her friends, Emily gives Owen her phone number but he finds one digit is missing. A romantic at heart, Owen searches the university Emily said she attended to try and find her despite knowing nothing about her except her first name.
Along the way, Owen meets another Emily (Angourie Rice), a psychology graduate student working on her thesis about how romantic love leads to self-sabotage. She finds Owen an interesting subject, so she subtly nudges him toward making grander romantic gestures in an effort to find her, but this makes Owen run afoul of local campus activists who deem him a dangerous stalker who refuses to accept the truth that the original Emily intentionally gave him a wrong number.
Of course, Owen and Emily become attached to each other during the search. As always, what makes romantic comedies work is having two protagonists to root for, and the film succeeds at that. Owen is awkward and his persistence is in some ways immature, and Emily is not being honest with him, but both remain likable even when they are doing things to make viewers cringe a little. The script also deftly satirizes campus activism without seeming like a Newsmax screed.
Like a lot of original films,
Finding Emily did not receive a robust marketing campaign, but it's worth
seeking out.
