Film Reviews: Finding Emily | Passenger | Hen

Finding Emily (12A) ★★★

Passenger (15) ★★★

Hen (15) ★★★★

If last week’s Obsession showed the fine line between rom-com and horror movie, Finding Emily turns the dial back towards romance without making a particularly convincing case that its love-sick protagonists are any less deranged. Set in contemporary Manchester — but populated by characters who seem to have been time-warped in from Oasis’s mad-for-it mid-90s heyday — it revolves around Owen (Spike Fearns), a young musician desperately seeking the titular Emily after a flirty night of fun in the student union where he works ends with her wrong numbering him as she heads off to re-join her friends.

Refusing to believe she’s politely given him the brush off, he plunges headlong into an ill-advised quest to find her, egged on by another Emily (played by Angourie Rice) who’s decided to covertly use him as an unwitting test subject for her psychology thesis on the self-sabotaging nature of love. The latter plot device is really an excuse for the film to deconstruct problematic rom-com tropes while simultaneously embracing all the genre clichés as Owen and Emily inevitably start falling for each other. Despite its high irritation factor, though, there are some funny lines; and Fearns and Rice are quite appealing, even if the same can’t always be said for their characters.

Nomadland gets a demonic reworking in Passenger, a jump-scare-laden horror film about a newly engaged couple (Lou Loubell and Jacob Scipio) who decide to embrace the “van life” movement, but soon find themselves stalked by a supernatural bogeyman after stopping to help the victim of a car crash on a dark rainy night. Though it gets pretty hokey after a strong start, Norwegian director André Øvredal (Troll Hunter) delivers some effective shocks and there’s a small, but fun role too for Melissa Leo as a veteran nomad well-versed in the legends of the open road.

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Following in the tradition of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, Hen serves up poignant portrait of contemporary Europe by following the travails of a chicken as she escapes her fate as a battery hen in Greece. Director György Pálfi sets the playful tone with his opening close-up shot of its titular protagonist’s birth — and he finds a strange beauty in the mechanised world of industrial farming, something he then subverts by juxtaposing it with the acts of kindness and cruelty his fowl protagonist bears witness to after she winds up in the courtyard of a crumbling seafood restaurant being used as a front for criminal enterprises. A smart and surprising film.

All films in cinemas from 22 May

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