For years, romantic comedies have romanticised emotionally unavailable men: commitment-phobes, detached cool guys and male love interests who literally need a woman standing in front of him, asking him to love her. And while those late ’90s and early 2000s rom-coms will forever be iconic, the same tropes were rinsed and repeated a little too much. Enter: the demise of rom-coms throughout the 2010s. But those days might be over. We’ve officially entered an era of men who yearn.
There’s something undeniably addictive about watching male characters wear their hearts on their sleeves, pining shamelessly and with an all-consuming intensity usually reserved for female characters. And Finding Emily proves exactly why they’re single-handedly breathing new life into the rom-com genre.
If you haven’t watched Finding Emily yet, I strongly advise you to do so. I left the cinema feeling light, giddy, and with all the warm and fuzzies you could ever wish for. And as my friends and I were debriefing about the film in the car, I declared: “Finding Emily has single handedly saved the rom-com genre.”
For those who are curious, Finding Emily follows Owen Bromptom (Spike Fearn), a goofy musician who falls head over heels for a girl he meets at a party, Emily (Sadie Soverall). But when he goes to text her the following day to ask her out, he finds there’s a digit missing from her number. What follows is a wild goose chase to find Emily, and in the process, he teams up with another Emily (Angourie Rice), a cynical psychology student who agrees to help him out… and use him as a case study for her assignment without his knowledge in the process.
Warning: There are spoilers ahead.
This man stops at nothing to try and capture Emily’s attention. In a crush-fuelled state of what Emily would call “love-induced delusion”, Owen sends an email to every single Emily that attends Manchester University. What comes next is a campus-wide frenzy that, if I were Owen, would make me want to buy a plane ticket and move countries… except that wouldn’t even be effective since his antics went viral worldwide. Debate sparked over whether he was a hopeless romantic, a major sex pest, or a weird creep who wouldn’t leave this poor girl alone.
To be cringe is to be free
He’s cuckoo bananas crazy for his manic pixie dream girl, and we love to see it. Having a male main character in a rom-com is also rare — it’s almost always from the woman’s perspective (or if we’re being generous, a shared POV). Typically, it’s the woman who’s silly, goofy, and falls madly. The male love interests are charismatic, but hardly ludicrously in love. But in Finding Emily, Owen’s golden-retriever, sunshine-y personality means he’s often cringey, and unashamedly so.
“I think what makes a good rom-com is just authenticity. Like sincerity, honesty. I feel like that’s what our film is about,” Angourie Rice told PEDESTRIAN.TV when asked what makes a good rom-com.
The filmmakers don’t make the mistake of trying to make him look stoic. Instead, they lean right into his lovesick whimsy, and it pays off. It’s exactly what rom-coms have been missing since the early 2000s.
We’ve entered a ‘men who yearn’ era
Originally, I placed all my faith in the resurgence of the rom-com in Finding Emily. That was until I binged Off Campus, and like the rest of the world, fell in love with the hockey boys of Briar University. Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli) isn’t the only character who stole my heart (and the hearts of every hopeless romantic, TBH), I also couldn’t get enough of Josh Logan (Antonio Cipriano) and Dean Di Laurentis (Stephen Kalyn).
And there’s one common denominator between these three and Owen from Finding Emily: they’re men who yearn.
Are they the first fictional characters to pine after women? No. But it’s been a hot minute since we’ve had male characters so loveable due to their vulnerability and willingness to do anything and everything to get the girl (or in John’s case, care so deeply that he’s willing to take a step back so as not to get in the way of his best friend’s romance).
Before Off Campus, there was Heated Rivalry. And prior to that, it was The Summer I Turned Pretty that had us in a romance-fuelled chokehold. We’ve entered a ‘men who yearn’ era, and with each new show and film, it hurls the rom-com genre out of the trenches and back into the limelight. (Yes, some of these series lean more romantic drama than rom-com, but you get the point.)
These yearning men are saving romantic comedies, and I am so thankful for it.
Streaming services can pump out originals and series like it’s nobody’s business, but until now, they’ve lacked the one key thing we’ve all been dying for: longing. Because beneath all the tropes, meet-cutes and grand gestures, yearning is what makes us care. There’s something deeply warming about watching a character love loudly and wholeheartedly, especially in an era where being detached, emotionally unavailable and too-cool-to-care has become normalised.
Owen sends humiliating emails. Garrett folds under the weight of his feelings. These men pine, they care, and they wear their hearts on their sleeves — and that’s exactly why audiences are falling for them.
Rom-coms were never dead. They were just waiting for men to start yearning again.
Image Credit: Prime Video / Universal Pictures
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