Finding Emily Review, Parents Guide & Age Rating

Finding Emily is Rated PG-13 by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for sexual references, language, some crude material and drug references.

This film is about Owen Brompton, a sound engineer with a shaggy-haired face, who works the boards at his university’s student bar, and the girl he can’t stop thinking about after one electric night. She appears in fairy wings, a recurring element in the film, almost as a self-deprecating joke, dances with him under string lights, and disappears into the crowd, but not without collecting her number into his phone.

The next morning, Owen calls, wrong number, but he missed a digit, and now all he has is a first name, and the kind of hope that makes a person do something stupid. That desperation puts Owen in the way of the other Emily, Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), a psychology student whose dissertation posits something that’s as unromantic as it gets: that love is an evolutionary bug, a psychosis we’ve supposedly outgrown.

Owen, who is only known by his first name, is her ideal subject, and she knows it before he does. I think what the film doesn’t quite get is the beat in which Emily realizes what Owen is to her research before she’s said a word about helping him, and Rice lets a glint of calculation cross her face that the script never quite catches up to. She offers to help him search. She does not reveal that she is writing a paper on the process.

That’s the moral decay that’s sown in scene three, and to the credit of the film, you never forget, that it’s there when the plot goes awry.

 Emily hands Owen a list of all 318 students named Emily on campus so he can email around. He sends it as one group email, rather than blind-copying, a faux pas so embarrassingly idiotic it’s the first time the film gets a real laugh, not a scripted one, and the repercussions are immediate and ugly, strangers calling him a stalker and worse in a pile-on that spreads across campus group chats overnight.

Instead of hiding, Owen admits to it on a student livestream, taking the blame and lying to cover for Emily’s role in it, and then singing the song he wrote for his mystery girl. It’s the time when the film demands that you actually feel something, and it mostly does, although the shift from public-humiliation comedy to earnest confession is too quick to be heard.

From there it goes where these campus stories go, house parties, drunk phone calls, a graduation party with a really stupid champagne tower, and the real relationship, the one between Owen and Emily, not Owen and the girl he thinks he wants, does its quiet work under the hood.

There’s grief the film doesn’t linger on but doesn’t avoid either: Owen says his mother passed away less than a year ago, and a physical altercation with his brother over selling the family house is harder than a comedy scene would be, because you can see both actors are upset, not acting an argument. Minnie Driver’s screen time is limited, but she adds an adult sense of balance to a story that otherwise never ventures beyond dorm rooms and pub booths, and I wish the film had trusted her more.

The climax is a double fork. When fairy-wings Emily resurfaces her name is actually Amelie and Owen finally gets the reunion the whole plot has been looking for. Sitting across from her, though, he realizes it’s the wrong reunion. He breaks up with Amelie and heads straight for Emily’s flat, where he finds her research files containing photos of himself and notes cataloging his own heartbreak as data points.

The betrayal is visually revealed before anyone has the chance to say a word: Fearn’s face simply collapses. The reconciliation arc that the genre requires is treated with greater forbearance than I would have liked from a film that spent its middle act on slapstick, and Emily has to come to terms with what she did for the sake of her ambition, while Owen must determine if an apology after discovery is worth anything.

In terms of tone, it’s no surprise that this is a Working Title film, as all three are, but it has a more frenetic, more panicky vibe than Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, more like a group chat that’s gone haywire than the laid-back charm of those earlier films.

Rice and Fearn’s chemistry is more like two people who really like each other than movie-magic romance, and that’s actually a good thing because the entire plot revolves around the difference between infatuation and true intimacy.

Fearn’s portrayal of Owen’s obliviousness is not condescending, even when it doesn’t make sense; Rice’s portrayal of Emily’s blind spot is not condescending, either, but is given real weight instead of collapsing into “the schemer. It’s just under two hours and doesn’t drag, although a few bits of side characters’ Owen’s flatmates deserve more screen time than they get.

Finding Emily Content Breakdown

Sexual references and Content: Early on, two women use the men’s toilets, and one jokes about preferring to “pee standing up,” which Owen responds to with a similarly unguarded comment about his own habits, a throwaway remark that plays for maybe four seconds and then fades.

Online strangers insult Owen in rapid succession on-screen after the email disaster, “pervert”, “creep”, “psycho sex pest”, even “paedophile”, which is a harsher string of words than the trailer leads you to believe, but it’s clearly meant to display cruelty, not titillation.

A misunderstanding over the word ‘coupons’ becomes an extended anatomy joke that three separate scenes will not let go. Emily makes an “asshole cake” to apologize to a friend, and the frosting joke that ensues is not innuendo, but slapstick. There’s no on-screen sex. The film’s closest approximation is when Owen walks in on his brother’s girlfriend sitting on him in a chair, which is resolved in seconds, clothes are adjusted, nothing is exposed and a conversation between Emily and a friend is completely covered by the bubbles in the tub.

Language: constant and specific British, “shit,” “twat,” “prick,” “arse,” “bollocks,” “bloody,” repeated use of “tits. One of the songs has a partially audible “motherf**k” sung. It’s not just one incident, it’s baked into the way Owen’s friend group communicates with one another, so it’s not shocking in any given moment, it’s pervasive.

Drug and alcohol, Emily excitedly showing off free cocktails at a club, adults smoking in the background of a party scene. Verbal references to weed and cocaine dealing, both of which are not depicted, and a joke about “a chill pill, like a Xanax. It doesn’t really advance the story, but the amount of drinking as a social ritual is important to know before a young teen watches it.

Violence: minor but not absent: a shoving match between Owen and his brother over their mother’s house, a scene of chaos where a group of women chase Owen out of a party, a woman getting knocked into at a pub, splitting her lip.

That injury is the most uncomfortable moment in the film, as a stranger in a kebab shop falsely accuses Owen of hitting her, yelling domestic abuse accusations at him in a crowded room. It’s played straight, not for laughs, and it’s awkwardly at odds with the lighter tone of the film elsewhere.

Emotional content: Owen’s grief over his mother is felt more than once, including when he is alone in a field crying after losing his job over the email fallout. It’s not as melodramatic as the trailer implies, and it’s a darker, heavier moment than that.

None of these is enough to make it more than a PG-13 campus comedy. It’s worth a second look before a young teen sees it because of the accumulation, and the language and crude jokes don’t go on the long haul, even when nothing else on screen has changed register.

Finding Emily Related FAQs

Is Finding Emily appropriate for a 13-year-old?

The MPA cited sexual references, language, drug references, and crude material, and most family-review sources recommend parental guidance for 13–15 years old.

Does Finding Emily have nudity?

No. There’s a brief comedic near-undress scene resolved with clothing quickly adjusted, and a bathtub conversation fully concealed by bubbles,  no explicit nudity anywhere in the film.

Is Finding Emily based on a true story?

No, it’s an original screenplay by Rachel Hirons built around a fictional wrong-number premise.

Who are the two Emilys in Finding Emily?

Amelie, the woman in fairy wings Owen meets on their first night and whose number he gets wrong, and Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), the psychology student who helps him search while secretly studying him for her dissertation.

Where was Finding Emily filmed?

Manchester, England, principal photography leaned heavily on the city’s university and nightlife scenes for its setting.

Is Finding Emily a good date movie or family movie?

It’s built for teens and adults, especially fans of British rom-coms, not a family movie night pick given the language and content, but a solid choice for older teens and adult couples.

Others Movie Parents Guide:

Sources referenced:

• Children and Media Australia — Finding Emily movie review
• The Wrap — “Finding Emily” Review
• Associated Press via Lethbridge Herald — Finding Emily movie review
• Marie Claire Australia — Angourie Rice on Finding Emily