Owen (Spike Fearn) is a sensitive soul; a young man in his early 20s, he has uneven bangs and a perpetually yearning expression. One evening, at the student union hall at Manchester City University where he works as a sound technician, love’s arrow strikes in the form of Emily (Sadie Soverall), who’s dressed as a fairy, has sparkling stars embedded in her eye shadow and seems to be the answer to his dreams. “I felt that time literally stood still,” he tells his brother wonderingly the next morning. “It was dead nice.” Only problem: She ran off into the night before he could get her last name, and the phone number she left on his cell is missing a digit.

“Finding Emily,” a British rom-com from Alicia MacDonald (in her feature film debut), is undeniably sweet, and those looking for a late-summer respite from action movies could do far worse than immerse themselves in the story of Owen and Emily — not fairy Emily, who remains elusive for a while, but another Emily (Angourie Rice), a perky American student of psychology who gets pulled into Owen’s earnest and not-a-little-bit obsessive quest, realizing that it might be quite useful for her thesis. The two of them spend much time together, strategizing ways to find the original Emily, and if you can’t see where this is going, you have clearly never seen a rom-com.

The fact that there are literally hundreds of Emilys at the college, many of whom are not thrilled to be contacted by Owen, is a particularly funny running gag (he’s soon known on campus as Email Guy), and MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons manage to keep the suspense going for rather longer than you’d think. (There’s a fair bit of suspension of disbelief involved, for the characters and the audience.)

Occasionally the film gets a little too caught up in its own adorableness — a sequence in which Owen and his brother bop along to music in the car goes on seemingly forever — but for the most part “Finding Emily” is just quirky enough, with a lovely sense of place and a few effective nods to “When Harry Met Sally …” for the rom-com completists. And if Owen seems a little too lovestruck to be true, never mind, as one character explains: “The true freedom in life is knowing you’re cringe, and doing it anyway.”

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