LOS ANGELES, Aug. 26 (UPI) — Finding Emily, in theaters Friday, has something to say about the behavior romantic comedies sell as endearing. However, it makes its characters so broad that it turns very legitimate observations into a joke.

Owen (Spike Fearn) meets Emily (Sadie Soverall) at the Manchester City University Student Union where he is a sound engineer. She gives him her phone number, but the next morning he finds it is one digit short.

Searching for Emilys on campus, Owen meets psychology thesis student Emily Raine (Angourie Rice). Hearing his story, Emily offers to help Owen find his Emily, secretly studying him for her thesis.

Raine’s theory, derived from Sigmund Freud and Toni Morrison, is that love is just a psychosis that causes people to act in self-destructive ways. Many a rom-com begin with characters who have sworn off love, so that’s fine.

It soon becomes clear that Raine was hurt by Tristan (Timothy Innes). It is common for people, a young academic especially, to try to find logical explanations for their emotional pain. The unsatisfying truth is that it’s just being human.

She questions why Owen would go to extra effort to reconnect with someone he only met for 20 minutes. Here, Owen is actually reasonable.

Making effort is not in and of itself harmful. In fact, reasonable effort should be encouraged. If you connected with someone, and it’s possible to locate them from a relatively small pool of university students named Emily, it’s worth a try.

There is a discouraging feeling in 2026 that people are unwilling to make minimal effort. Finding Emily does not reckon with the major reason people would be suspicious of Owen’s effort: dating apps.

People turned to dating apps to reduce the effort of meeting people. The theory is if you’re going to go out and spend the night meeting people you don’t connect with, you might as well just stay home and swipe profiles on your phone.

It took over a decade for app users to realize that the shortcut makes all the other people with profiles invest less in the interaction too. Owen spent time with someone and just wants to spend more time with her.

Except, Finding Emily is still putting him in a contrived rom-com scenario. We know from every other rom-com that spending time with Raine will make them connect, except she’s not just spending time with him to get to know him, and he will find out according to the genre rules anyway.

Movie characters have gotten away with interrupting weddings, holding boom boxes and other elaborate gestures that probably wouldn’t work out so well in real life. Men were not the only perpetrators either. Meg Ryan essentially stalked a widower and his son in Sleepless in Seattle.

It’s actually Raine who escalates Owen’s search in unhealthy ways that are required both by her thesis and for the plot of the movie to continue. Owen’s gestures are interpreted unfavorably by the Emilys on campus.

There is the kernel of an interesting idea. We know Owen is well-meaning and only wants to reach one Emily. 300 other Emilys think a stranger is trying to contact them and that is alarming.

Rather than deal with the honest humor of a legitimate misunderstanding, Finding Emily turns the wrong Emilys into caricatures. Student Union President Emily Thewlis (Kat Ronney) not only reports Owen to the Dean (Minnie Driver), but leads protests against the man they perceive as harassing them.

At this point, Thewlis becomes the caricature that “anti-woke” complainers imagine when someone politely tells them to back off or use less offensive language. There’s a sense that she’s not genuinely upset. She just found a talking point.

For his part, Owen realizes he crossed a line and wants to make it right. He even considers that his Emily gave him an invalid number on purpose.

The situation spirals out of his control, with more caricatures like a salacious podcast host (Nadia Parkes) who will spin everything he says into something nefarious. This also becomes contrived because he didn’t know the podcast was video so now all the Emilys see his face.

He works on this campus and he agreed to go on the school podcast to clear his name, but didn’t see an episode first?

A recurring guy who keeps asking why Owen and Emily are news is the only acknowledgement that the campus, and the movie itself, blew up a very small interaction into an entire news story/movie plot.

The film is full of caricatures even in its basic machinations. Raine’s professor (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is a caricature of a pretentious, careerist authority.

Every caricature is at such an 11 that the entire film feels anxious rather than endearing. Raine’s anxiety is understandable. She’s on deadline and trying to rationalize her emotions, but let the world around her be normal.

Several scenes in a row stop midway when the characters decide to go do something else. Owen aborts a fight with his brother to go to a party full of Emilys, which he has to escape prematurely, so goes somewhere with Raine, which they also leave abruptly when she gets hurt.

It creates an unresolved feeling, not in a missed opportunity way. After a while, you just want the movie to finish a scene.

Owen does know the full name of his Emily’s friend. He fails to get her attention on campus, but if he knows her name surely he could find her again and ask, “Hey, if she meant to give me a wrong number, cool, but just in case please let her know I’m looking for her.”

People finally act human a bit too late, though supporting characters still do schtick to the bitter end.

It would be a wonderful thing to bring back meeting people in real life and spending time getting to know them. Alas, Finding Emily is unlikely to be the vehicle to do so.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.