“Finding Emily” is a 2026 romantic comedy film directed by Alicia MacDonald and starring Angourie Rice as Emily Raine and Spike Fearn as Owen Brampton. The film is set on a university campus located in Manchester, England. The film centers around the male protagonist Owen, a sound engineer who works at the campus bar and is an aspiring musician. During one of his work shifts, he meets what he describes as his dream girl, Emily. Dressed as a magical fairy, Owen and Emily dance the night away. However, when Emily rushes to leave the bar to go to a friend’s birthday party, Owen asks for her number and receives it, but with one digit missing. He only realizes this the next morning. 

A hopeless romantic, Owen makes it his mission to find the dream girl Emily he met last night and goes all over campus finding her. This is what leads Owen to cross paths with Emily Raine, a third-year Psychology international student. Unlike Owen, whose external goal in the film is to find his dream girl named Emily, Emily Raine’s external goal is to finish her thesis and receive a passing grade in order to work a prestigious job and stay in Manchester. Although both protagonists have differing goals, Emily Raine agrees to help Owen to find Emily and Owen unknowingly helps Emily Raine with her thesis through being a case study. Without Owen’s consent nor knowledge, Emily uses Owen’s behaviour in finding Emily as a case study to support her thesis that humans forming romantic attachment with another human is a form of evolutionary madness. 

Throughout the entire film, Emily Raine commits many unethical actions while conducting her psychological research on human attachment. First, she does not ask for Owen’s consent to participate in being the case study that frames her thesis. Second, when conducting naturalistic observational research on Owen in his journey of finding Emily, she intrudes on some of the decisions Owen makes. For example, when Emily Raine finds out she is able to see the list of emails of every student named Emily who enrolled in the unnamed university in Manchester, she lets Owen, a non-university student, access these emails. This leads Owen to anonymously email every single female student named Emily on campus, leading to a campaign led by the student union president Emily Thewlis against Owen, who Thewlis refers to as “Email Guy”. 

The further the campaign spreads on campus and the deepening of the relationship between Owen and Emily Raine, the more guilt Raine faces as she contemplates the morality of her actions and her thesis. When Owen finds out about Raine’s true intentions in helping on his goal of finding Emily, he cuts all contact with Emily Raine, leading Raine to spiral. Although Emily Raine accomplished her external goal as she submitted her thesis and received a high mark, she still did not feel satisfied knowing that she had hurt Owen. So, to make amends, she goes on the campus popular podcast and takes accountability for lending access to the emails of every female student named Emily to Owen, also referred to as “Email Guy”. Then, during her thesis presentation, she admits her study was conducted unethically, and the findings were biased. The film ended with Owen and Emily Raine fixing their strained relationship and deepening into a romantic bond.  

Finding Emily (2026) is a great film to watch as a psychology major and examine the unethical errors Emily commits when conducting psychological research. Additionally, it is a moving film about the importance of taking risks in the name of love and that human’s ability to form romantic attachments with others is, in fact, not a form of evolutionary madness. 

Watch the trailer here. 

Contributing Writer: Ahalya Ravichandran

Feature Image Credit: Pawel Janiak on Unsplash