Finding You review – sex-free teen romance for Twilight generation

Although the main characters in this romantic tale are meant to be just over 18, this Sky Movies release is manifestly aimed at a much younger market with its sex-free storyline and nice-girls-finish-first morality. Sure, the plot is as corny as Cracker Jack, revolving as it does around wholesome blond normcore kid Finley (Rose Reid), an aspiring violinist, who arrives in rural Ireland from New York to do a semester abroad and falls in love with non-threateningly baby-faced movie star Beckett (Jedidiah Goodacre).

But the film-makers have taken pains to gussy it up with a few contemporary details. For example, Beckett (who, like all the American characters, inexplicably has a last name for a first name) is in Ireland to work on a Game of Thrones-style fantasy movie series. Meanwhile Finley, compelled by her Irish Studies teacher to mingle with a local elder, reads the Twilight novels to her assigned crotchety old biddy Cathleen (Vanessa Redgrave, no less). Both references thus allow the film to namecheck other romantic texts that this demographic loves – and sort of laugh at them at the same time.

While on the whole unbelievably cheery and starry-eyed about Ireland, right down to the local homeless drunk (Patrick Bergin) being a crack fiddle player who teaches Finley to play from the heart, there are a few nods to the harsher realities of life. It turns out that Cathleen, treated as a pariah by the whole town because she allegedly stole her sister’s sweetheart and married him, was really trying to save her sibling from an abusive marriage by sacrificing herself. (Perhaps that’s meant to be a period-accurate act of masochism?) Mirroring that, Beckett’s manager-father Montgomery (Tom Everett Scott) is eventually unmasked for exploiting his kid’s talent and fame for his own profit.

But those tiny specks of grit get entirely smoothed over in pearlescent sentimentality by the end, eased through by lashings of flute-and-fiddle noodlings on the soundtrack.

Finding You is available on Sky Cinema and Now TV.



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