The problem with Finding Emily is not that no one in it acts like a real and reasonable human being, although no one does — not its exhaustingly lovelorn hero (Spike Fearn‘s Owen), nor its acridly skeptical heroine (Angourie Rice‘s Emily), nor any of the screeching over-reactors and thoughtless under-reactors surrounding them. Absurd behavior is, after all, a cornerstone of the rom-com genre; if you didn’t want to believe in a world where the path to true love cuts through harebrained fake dating schemes or HR-nightmare jobs that require getting dumped, you’d watch something else.

No, the problem with Finding Emily is that it’s so busy reassuring you how delightful it is that none of its characters act like real and reasonable human beings that it forgets to conjure the necessary magic to make you love them anyway. Lacking not just in sense but charm and chemistry to boot, this would-be defense of rom-com tropes against our jaded age ends up, instead, far more cynical than any of the criticisms it’s supposedly fighting against.

Director Alicia MacDonald and screenwriter Rachel Hirons’ self-awareness is apparent from the opening scene, an utterly classic meet-cute. At a party one night, struggling musician Owen strikes a connection with a young woman (Sadie Soverall) that feels downright magical — she’s even dressed as a fairy, emphasizing the dreaminess of the moment. In the cold light of day, however, Owen discovers his happy ending is further away than he might have hoped. The number she’s left him with is one digit short, making a follow-up text impossible.

But Owen, a romantic so starry-eyed that Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother would have advised him to chill, is not so easily deterred. Knowing nothing about his fantasy woman beyond her first name (Emily) and her school (Manchester City University, where he works as a sound engineer), he mounts a no-holds-barred campaign to track her down, pestering the school secretary for contact information and then papering the entire campus with wanted posters when that fails.

This is, to put it plainly, kinda creepy behavior, and initially it seems to be to the film’s credit that it recognizes this. Finding Emily presents itself as a rom-com that doubles as a thought exercise in how genre tropes like nice guys and manic pixie dream girls play in the era of Obsession and Companion, Couch Guy and West Elm Caleb, think pieces about incels and rape culture and toxic masculinity. But much like its own female lead, it can’t seem to resist pressing its thumb on the scale.

Because as hopeless as Owen’s dreamy idealism might be (“Oh no, not again” groans his brother, played by Jack Riddiford, when he hears about the mystery girl), he’s not the really the off-putting one here. That would be Rice’s Emily Raine, the psych student he rudely pulls out of class while looking for his One True Emily.

This Emily does not believe in romance at all, and in fact is working on a thesis paper “proving” that love is just a useless self-sabotaging state of psychosis. In Owen, she sees the perfect case study, or as she puts it, “my very own Stanford prison experiment.” And as with the actual Stanford prison experiment, questions of ethics and scientific validity are sidelined in favor of getting splashy results by any means necessary. Forging Owen’s signature on consent forms and posing as just a helpful bystander, she encourages him to keep looking when he’s ready to quit and manipulates him into more and more extreme efforts, culminating in an un-BCCed email blast sent to all 318 Emilys enrolled at the school.

Does this sound like the foundation for a true and lasting love? Or does it sound like an unforgivable breach of trust, as well as a hopelessly sloppy project that Emily’s professor (an amusingly grumpy Prassana Puwanarajah) should have nipped in the bud? I found it to be the latter, but Finding Emily stakes its bet on the former, and keeps doubling down even as the consequences pile up for Owen.

Once the email goes viral, Owen becomes a TikTok trending topic, a subject of clickbaity internet explainers (“Creep, criminal, or just cringe?”), an urgent campus security issue, a catalyst for student protests against predators. Even a winsome serenade to the Mystery Emily during an otherwise disastrous podcast interview only goes so far in turning the tide; while some onlookers are swayed to his side, others just expand their repertoire of insults from “rapist virgin” to “toxic incel true-crime Ed Sheeran.”

But if the fallout for Owen has a distinctly modern flavor, complete with trendy buzzwords getting thrown around social media, Finding Emily‘s take on his journey is stubbornly old-fashioned. “I’ve burned my bra, I’ve done the work,” snaps a dean (Minnie Driver tepidly channeling Allison Janney in 10 Things I Hate About You) who has no interest in listening to strident feminist activists like Emily Thewlis (Kat Rooney) complain about how Owen’s grand email gesture was sexual harassment or whatever.

And why would the dean be? Finding Emily has stacked the deck insurmountably in favor of Owen, whom we know to be utterly harmless and unimpeachably pure of heart. By making him the sole lighting rod for all these issues, it raises valid concerns around consent, boundaries and male entitlement only to dismiss them as hysterical. Besides, we know who’s really to blame for this whole mess — it’s not this would-be lover boy but the ruthless woman who exploited his genuine sentiment for her own careerist ends.

What’s especially exasperating about Finding Emily’s sour fixation on fending off imaginary haters is that there are moments when it betrays just enough sweetness to make you want to want these characters to make it work. I found Emily Raine too devious to like, and yet Rice plays her with enough brightness that she’s hard to completely hate. Fearn’s choice to play Owen as a mumbling, fidgeting ball of heart-on-sleeve emotion makes him feel natural and authentic, even as the circumstances surrounding him grow ever more contrived.

The two share the shaggy, laid-back ease of fast friends more than the burning desire of lovers-to-be. (My kingdom for romances to actually start casting for palpable heat again.) But there are small gestures — like when Owen defends Emily’s disgusting chip shop order before an ex (Timothy Innes) making fun of it — when it’s possible to understand how even a heart as firmly closed as Emily’s might crack open for a guy this unapologetically sincere. Maybe there could have been something there, in the unforced affection between the two stars. It’s a shame the rest of the movie — the unhinged plot, the one-sided debates, the smug self-referentiality — makes this couple impossible to root for.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Primal, the studio’s new genre label led by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, has acquired rights to The Troop, the 2014 horror novel by Nick Cutter, enlisting Chris Basler to pen the feature adaptation.

The Troop follows a troop of boys who, while on their annual scout camping trip, encounter an intruder who unleashes something far more terrifying than any campfire ghost story. As fear spreads, a brutal struggle for survival begins, turning the boys against the infected… and each other.

Cutter is the pseudonym for USA Today bestseller Craig Davidson, whose novel won the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing.

Lyrical Media, the company behind Adam Wingard’s A24 action thriller Onslaught and the upcoming Osgood Perkins film The Young People, is set to produce the feature take, with Tracy Rosenblum overseeing the project for Paramount Primal.

Previously, Basler has developed projects for both film and television with Blumhouse, Bad Robot, Annapurna, the Picture Co., Tango, Hivemind, Cloud Nine, and the Black List, among others. He is repped by UTA, Untitled, and Ziffren Brittenham.

As Nick Cutter, Davidson is also known for books like The Dorians, The Deep, Little Heaven, The Queen, and The Handyman Method, co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan. Fiction written under his own name includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and the short story collection Cascade. He is repped by UTA and Kirby Kim at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Formally unveiled in July, Paramount Primal kicked things off with a bang with the announcement of a new A Nightmare on Elm Street movie, to be released domestically by Paramount. Currently in production on Tyler Falbo’s R-rated comedy Boys for Life, they’re simultaneously developing the R-rated fantasy Tower Defense from writer Evan Daugherty, along with the high-concept thriller Sweet Spot penned by Nic Curcio and Kirby Gladstein.

Andrea Eastman, who as the head of casting at Paramount Pictures brought Ali MacGraw to Goodbye, Columbus and James Caan to The Godfather before serving as a manager and longtime ICM agent, has died. She was 86.

Eastman died Wednesday in her sleep at her home in Santa Barbara, publicist Jill Fritzo told The Hollywood Reporter.

A real straight-shooter, Eastman discovered Jaclyn Smith, got Steven Spielberg and Roy Scheider together for Jaws (1975), managed Sylvester Stallone in his Rocky heyday and talked Rob Reiner into hiring her client — and his best friend — Billy Crystal for When Harry Met Sally … (1989).

With a long stint at ICM in Los Angeles and New York, she also repped and/or managed Barbra Streisand, Burt Reynolds, Peter Boyle, Chevy Chase, Henry Winkler, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Reeve, Katharine Ross, Christopher Plummer, James Brolin, Dustin Hoffman, Dyan Cannon, Gabriel Byrne, Brenda Vaccaro, Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Kathleen Turner, Stockard Channing, Tony Danza, Wes Craven, Katherine Heigl, Katie Couric, Elle MacPherson, Marshall Brickman and Charlie Rose, among many others over the years.

Eastman fought to cast MacGraw, then a 30-year-old photographer’s assistant and model new to acting, for the role of the younger Jewish-American princess Brenda Patimkin opposite Richard Benjamin as her romantic interest Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus (1969), directed by Larry Peerce.

Natalie Wood had already turned down the part, and the studio had looked at hundreds of other actresses before MacGraw came aboard. (The year the movie hit theaters, MacGraw wed Paramount Studios chief Robert Evans.)

Eastman initiated the casting for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and worked with Fred Roos to hire actors for the eventual Oscar winner for best picture.

“You make endless lists when you are a casting director,” she said in 2023. “When you do a movie, you try to think out of the box. For The Godfather, it was endless casting. We worked seven days a week. I was dreaming of Italians all night every night.”

Eastman thought Italian producer Carlo Ponti would make a great Vito Corleone before Godfather author Mario Puzo came up with the idea to cast Marlon Brando.

Caan had excelled in his screen test for the film and was slated to play Michael Corleone opposite the hulking Carmine Caridi as Sonny Corleone (Coppola had offered him the role in a bar). But when Al Pacino was hired to play Michael, Caan was out of the movie.

Caridi “was a big guy but not menacing. He was like a big Saint Bernard,” Eastman said. “Luckily, he’d never formally signed a deal, and Coppola trusted me. He was leaving for Sicily [to scout locations], so he told me, ‘Just cast my fucking movie!’”

After getting Charlie Bluhdorn, head of Paramount parent Gulf + Western, and Evans to sign off on Caan as Sonny and Pacino as Michael, Eastman hurriedly got Caan to sign a contract before someone changed their mind.

“We all worked as a team, but I am responsible for Jimmy Caan getting the part of Sonny,” she said. This era was the happiest time in her career, she often noted, but she would quit the studio in early 1973.

Born on June 15, 1940, Eastman grew up in Westport, Connecticut, where she attended Staples High School. She graduated from Ohio State University and married producer and backgammon expert Bruce Becker; after they divorced, she moved to California.

In summer 1968, she was working as an assistant for $150 a week for Paramount head of casting Joyce Selznick when the niece of Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick was fired. Eastman, then 28, took her place and made $300 a week.

She first spotted Smith when both were in the audience at the stage musical Hallelujah, Baby! “She was gorgeous,” Eastman said in an interview last year. “I walked up to her and gave her my card. She looked at me like, ‘Who is this person? She’s my age.’ And then I brought her in and she met Charlie Bluhdorn and Bob Evans and we put her under contract.” (Smith would play as a wedding guest in Goodbye, Columbus.)

Eastman’s tenure at Paramount also saw the release of such notable films as True Grit (1969), Downhill Racer (1969), the box office sensation Love Story (1970), Catch 22 (1970), T.R. Baskin (1971) and Play It Again, Sam (1972).

She said she quit Paramount when Frank Yablans, who had recently replaced Stanley R. Jaffe as studio chief, threatened to fire her if she attended the 1973 Academy Awards, where The Godfather was nominated for 11 Oscars.

She took a job at double her previous salary as an agent at International Famous Agency; her clients back then included Ross, Boyle, Curtis, Benjamin and Paula Prentiss.

She left to become Stallone’s manager, and that led to her agreeing in 1977 to form a joint personal management company with Jeff Wald, Ron DiBlasio and Herb Nanas. But soon after introducing Stallone to Wald, she was told by DiBlasio that “we don’t want to go forward with you, Jeff’s going to have his own company,” she recalled in 2023.

She said she was offered $25,000 but turned that down, and she would file a $1 million suit against Wald and DiBlasio for damages. She formed her own company, Andrea Eastman Management, before joining ICM in 1983.

She said Spielberg offered Scheider the role of police chief Martin Brody in Jaws at one of her dinner parties and that Reiner gave Crystal his script to When Harry Met Sally at one of her weddings. Later, she convinced Streisand to appear in an unglamorous role in Meet the Frockers (2004).

Eastman moved to Bozeman, Montana, full-time in 2005 and retired from ICM in 2010.

Survivors include her husband, attorney Richard Wilsker; she earlier was married to Paul N. Lazarus III (Westworld, Capricorn One).

In the 2022 Paramount+ miniseries The Offer, Eastman was portrayed by Stephanie Koenig. She said she did not appreciate that she and Godfather producer Al Ruddy were depicted as having a one-night stand when it fact they had love affair that lasted more than a year.

She established a sanctuary in Montana near Big Sky Resort dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating and sheltering maltreated, abandoned and abused horses and dogs, and her impact as an animal advocate was chronicled in Jill Rappaport’s 2004 book, People We Know, Horses They Love.

In the late 1990s, she enlisted Robert Redford’s help in getting the nation’s first state initiative to ban the slaughter of horses for human consumption passed.

She spent three months in 2020 at the Beverly Hills Hotel recovering from open-heart surgery. Her late golden retriever had the run of the place, which was operating at a limited capacity during COVID, and a kids picture book written from the pooch’s perspective, Trooper at the Beverly Hills Hotel, was published in 2022.

After some tough early years in Hollywood, Eastman proved to be as tough as they come. “One of the things [you learn] being an agent is you don’t give up,” she said in 2014. “You never take no for an answer.”