Richard Crouse

CAST: Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver. Directed by Alicia MacDonald.

REVIEW: In true rom com fashion, one night in a loud Manchester student bar sound engineer and bumbling romantic Owen (Spike Fearn) becomes instantly smitten by Emily (Sadie Soverall), a young woman wearing fairy wings he meets on the dancefloor. Before leaving, she gives him her number, then disappears. The next morning as he attempts to text her, he has a terrible realization—she mistyped the number. “It’s missing a digit.”

“I don’t know herb last name,” he says, “or anything that will help me find her.”

Unable to reach Emily, he sets off on a mission to track her down which puts him in the sights of another Emily (Angourie Rice), an American psychology student studying on a visa, who agrees to help him in his search. “She’s a perfect, uncomplicated, heteronormative projection of everything you want her to be,” she says of Emily Number 1.

But she has an ulterior motive. She’s writing a thesis called “Romantic Attachment: A Self-Sabotaging Madness.”

“He’s the case study I’ve been waiting for,” she says. “He’s my very own Stanford prison experiment.”

For her, he’s a case study in how romantic attachments cause “temporary psychosis.”

Owen’s quest to locate “Fairy Emily” soon becomes a sensation, for better and for worse. What some people see as a sweet attempt at getting her attention, other view as stalking.

He becomes a social media star after serenading the missing Emily online and sending e-mails to every woman named Emily at the school. But as Owen gets closer to finding his Emily, psychologist Emily begins to rethink her scientific thesis.

Produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the team behind gold standard romantic comedies like “Bridget Jones,” “Notting Hill” and “About Time,” “Finding Emily” has all the trappings of a regular rom com, but there’s a Northern English grittiness to it—it’s a bit of a Valentine to Manchester—that sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill comedic romance.

The usual web of misunderstandings, personal complications, grand gestures and last-minute declarations are present, but it gently massages these rules of the genre to make it more limber than the same old. Tropes for the age of social media, campus culture and post #MeToo attitudes are welcome additions and never overplayed.

The film also deftly side-steps the toxic masculinity inherent in some of Owen’s dodgier schemes by framing them as ideas for Emily’s psychological study, and not the behavior of a predator.

The film’s heart and soul is Spike Fearn. Looking like the third, long lost Gallagher brother, he brings a scruffy, heartfelt appeal to Owen. Without an ounce of cynicism, he wears his heart on his sleeve and is a charming, if somewhat clueless focal point for the romantic action.

Also, next time around please give Minnie Driver’s terse and hilarious school dean character a movie of her own, or at least more to do in the sequel.

“Finding Emily” is a little longer than it needs to be but it’s just original and charming enough to be worth a look.