Film reviews: Classic rom-com rules still apply in Finding Emily
From left: Lou Llobell as Maddie in Passenger; Spike Fearne as Owen and Angourie Rice as Emily in Finding Emily; Pedro Pascal as The Mandalorian in Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu
★★★★☆
The meet-cute is an indispensable element of romantic comedy, so Finding Emily (12A) wastes no time in getting down to brass tacks, opening with sound engineer Owen (Spike Fearn) literally bumping into student Emily (Sadie Soverall) on the dance-floor of a bar at Manchester University.
Sparks fly, but when the smitten Owen tries to ring Emily a couple of days later, he discovers that she’s given him a number with a missing digit.
An oversight, insists Owen — a subtle ghosting, insists everyone else.
Undeterred, Owen embarks on a needle-in-a-haystack campaign to find Emily in a university population of 40,000, during which he encounters Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), an American psychology student working on a thesis that echoes Freud’s idea that love is a temporary psychosis.
Might Owen be the perfect case study to prove Emily’s theory?
Written by Rachel Hirons and directed by Alicia MacDonald, Finding Emily is something of a high-wire act, a rom-com that proceeds by deconstructing the rom-com conventions — while also exploring the genre’s traditionally crowd-pleasing aspects against the backdrop of contemporary dating.
Is Owen an old-fashioned romantic for trying to track down Emily, or is he a single-minded predator who doesn’t respect boundaries and female agency?
Meanwhile, the classic rom-com rules still apply, as the cynical Emily Raine — having inserted herself into Owen’s life by pretending that she will help him find the elusive original Emily — discovers that she is falling for the naive but sincere Owen; a development — if acted upon — that will completely undermine her thesis, her academic future, and Emily’s own personal belief system.
It’s an ambitiously complex plot, but the script is cleverly written and sharply directed, and Angourie Rice and Spike Fearn are both very likeable as the leading pair.
★★☆☆☆
Emerging from a galaxy far, far away (ie, the Star Wars universe, shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi), Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A) stars Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin, a former bounty hunter now working for the New Republic.
Commissioned by Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) to bring in the Imperial war criminal Lord Janu (Johnny Coyne), the Mandalorian and his young apprentice Grogu (aka ‘Baby Yoda’) must first secure the release of the captured Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), Jabba the Hutt’s prodigal son.
The Star Wars movies were never the most sophisticated when it came to plotting, but Jon Favreau’s film is as basic as B-movie westerns get: The Mandalorian — with Pedro Pascal largely anonymous behind his mask — is a gunslinger monotonously eliminating any and all exotic alien creatures that cross his path, while the script appears to have been written by a 12-year-old.
For Star Wars completists only.
★★☆☆☆
New Yorkers Mattie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio) take to the road in a camper van in Passenger (15A), only to discover that ‘van life’ is a dangerous business: “People don’t take trips; trips take people.”
Having made the fateful decision to stop one night on a lonely stretch of road to help a car crash victim, Mattie and Tyler are horrified to realise that their van is now haunted by an ancient supernatural evil that’s impossible to outrun.
Written by TW Burgess and Zachary Donohue, and directed by André Øvredal, Passenger seeks to mine horror from the prosaic routines of driving and the open road. Despite the best efforts of the likeable Lou Llobell and Jacob Scipio however, the movie spends most of its run-time spinning its tyres and never gets out of second gear.
Even the most outré of horror scenarios must obey its own internal logic; Passenger’s limp attempts at tension-building and jump-scares don’t work because its evil entity is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, an all-powerful creature that for some inexplicable reason lacks the wherewithal to finish off its intended victims.
- All theatrical releases
