Finding Emily begins with a simple mistake: a young musician receives the wrong telephone number for the woman he believes could be his perfect match.
Instead of accepting that the opportunity has disappeared, he decides to find her. His search brings him together with a driven psychology student who understands people well enough to recognise the weaknesses in his romantic plan—but agrees to help him anyway.
What begins as an attempt to locate one woman grows into a campus-wide search, creating confusion, unexpected attention and a relationship the musician may be too distracted to recognise.
The musician searching for an idea
Spike Fearn plays the lovesick musician at the centre of the story.
He is not searching for a missing person in the traditional sense. He is pursuing a brief connection and the possibility he has attached to it. The incorrect number gives him no direct path forward, leaving him with an image of someone he barely knows and the belief that finding her will resolve his romantic uncertainty.
His musical personality is important because it suggests that he already understands the appeal of emotion, performance and grand gestures. Those instincts can make the search charming, but they can also prevent him from seeing the difference between a real relationship and an idealised story he has created for himself.
He needs practical help from someone less willing to be carried away by the fantasy.
The psychology student who joins the search
Angourie Rice plays the psychology student who becomes his unlikely partner.
She is ambitious, observant and more structured than the musician she agrees to assist. Her knowledge of human behaviour makes her useful in tracking possibilities, interpreting limited information and understanding why people respond to the search as they do.
However, joining his mission introduces disorder into her own carefully directed life. The search expands beyond a private favour and begins attracting attention across the campus. Every new lead creates another complication, while the two students spend increasing amounts of time together.
Their personalities create the romantic-comedy engine. He follows emotion before evidence. She looks for patterns and explanations. He is focused on the woman he imagines. She is present for the entire search.
The audience can see the contradiction before he does.
How the wrong number becomes campus chaos
A wrong telephone number should end the story. Here, it begins one.
With little reliable information, the pair must identify the woman through indirect clues and the people who may have encountered her. Their effort spreads across the university, involving students who have their own interpretations of the search.
A personal romantic mission becomes a public event. Curiosity turns into participation, and participation creates misunderstandings. The musician’s private idea of love is tested once other people begin shaping the search.
The campus setting gives the story space to move between music, student ambitions, friendship and the pressure of deciding what comes after university. The characters are not only trying to find Emily. They are also trying to understand who they want to become.
Who is Emily?
The title places Emily at the centre, but the story’s central question may not be her location.
Emily represents the possibility of a perfect connection—the person the musician believes he missed because of one incorrect digit. His pursuit gives him a goal, but it may also protect him from examining the people and opportunities directly in front of him.
The psychology student understands that attraction can be shaped by projection. The less the musician knows about Emily, the easier it becomes for him to imagine that she is exactly the person he wants.
That creates the film’s most useful romantic conflict. Is he searching for a real woman, or for the version of love he has constructed around her?
The story does not need to ridicule his feelings. His hope is sincere. It must instead show him learning that sincerity does not make every romantic assumption true.
Love, ambition and competing priorities
The search tests more than the developing bond between its two leads.
Both characters have ambitions outside romance. The musician’s identity and future are connected to his art. The psychology student has academic and professional goals that may not accommodate a campus spectacle.
As the search grows, they must decide how much time and personal risk they are willing to invest. Their partnership may bring them closer, but it can also expose differences in how they approach responsibility, attention and the future.
A successful romantic comedy needs an obstacle that comes from character rather than a misunderstanding that could be resolved in one conversation. Here, that obstacle is the musician’s determination to find someone else while forming a genuine connection with the person helping him.
The supporting characters
Minnie Driver appears in the supporting cast alongside Ella Maisy Purvis, Timothy Innes, Alicia MacDonald, Kat Ronney and Yali Topol Margalith.
The wider ensemble is important because the search depends on the campus community. Friends, classmates and authority figures can turn a small romantic problem into something much larger.
Their involvement should also prevent the film from becoming visually repetitive. The story can move through performances, university spaces and different student groups while the central pair’s relationship changes beneath the activity.
The filmmakers behind Finding Emily
Alicia MacDonald directs the film from a screenplay by Rachel Hirons. Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Olivier Kaempfer serve as producers, with Working Title and Focus Features behind the release.
That production background suits the material. The premise belongs to the tradition of British romantic comedies that use a simple social mistake to reveal deeper insecurities about love and identity.
The challenge is keeping the story emotionally credible once the search becomes increasingly chaotic. The central relationship must remain believable beneath the larger comic situations.
What viewers should expect
Finding Emily is designed as a light romantic comedy rather than a mystery about a dangerous disappearance.
Viewers should expect:
A university setting
Music and youthful ambition
A search driven by romantic idealism
Contrasting personalities forced to work together
Campus-wide misunderstandings
A developing relationship hidden inside another romantic objective
The film carries a PG-13 rating and has a reported running time of one hour and 51 minutes.
Flicklevel story outlook
The premise works because the wrong number creates two searches at once.
The obvious search is for Emily. The more interesting one concerns what the musician actually wants from love and whether he can recognise it when it does not arrive in the form he expected.
Angourie Rice’s character should be crucial. She cannot exist only to guide the musician toward his emotional revelation. Her ambitions, choices and reasons for joining the search need equal weight.
If the film gives both characters complete lives, Finding Emily could turn its playful campus premise into a warm story about the difference between pursuing an imagined connection and building a real one.
Finding Emily opens in US cinemas on August 28, 2026.
Official source: Focus Features | Official trailer