119 min | PG | May 14, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
An American violinist heads to Ireland for a study-abroad semester and falls for a movie star shooting a fantasy franchise in her village. He is famous and shallow. She teaches him to be real. You have seen this exact movie before, and it had fewer leprechauns.
Finley Sinclair travels to Ireland to study music after failing her conservatory audition. On the plane she meets Beckett Rush, a young actor shooting the latest installment of a dragon-slaying franchise nearby. He plays the arrogant celebrity. She plays the grounded girl who sees the person underneath. Brian Baugh’s film is a faith-friendly romance that assembles every contrivance the genre keeps in stock and uses all of them at once. The movie is about grief and self-forgiveness, but it buries those ideas under a checklist of love-story machinery.
Rose Reid plays Finley with a steadiness that the script keeps undercutting with voiceover. She is most convincing in the quiet scenes with her violin, where she does not have to deliver dialogue that explains her own emotions. Jedidiah Goodacre plays Beckett as a movie star learning humility, and he sells the charm better than the depth. Katherine McNamara plays Taylor Risdale, the co-star and obstacle, with one note of jealousy. Vanessa Redgrave appears as Cathleen Sweeney, an elderly woman at a care home, and she brings more gravity in three scenes than the romance manages across its entire run. The film does not deserve her.
Baugh directs and writes, and the seams of doing both show. The Irish countryside cinematography is the strongest element, all green hills and stone, and Baugh frames Finley’s violin practice against the coast with real care. The editing then rushes the emotional beats that need room. A montage replaces every scene where two people might actually fall for each other. The score swells on cue to tell the audience what to feel because the script has not earned it. The fantasy-franchise subplot exists only to manufacture a third-act crisis and never reads as a real movie within the movie.
Finding You wants to be a story about a young woman finding her voice after loss. That story is in here, sketched in the violin scenes and the Redgrave subplot, and it is the better film struggling to surface. The romance keeps shoving it aside for airport reunions and public misunderstandings and a famous boyfriend who must choose between fame and love. Baugh has the locations and a cast that could carry something tender. He settles for the formula instead, and the formula flattens everything underneath it.