Emily review — a fresh and atmospheric take on the Wuthering Heights author, Emily Brontë.

Actress Frances O'Connor (Mansfield Park, The Conjuring 2) takes on directing duties for this period drama that “imagines” what author Emily Brontë’s life might have been like. Assuming, that is, she’d poured her life and personality into that of her famous Wuthering Heights heroine, Catherine Earnshaw. Brontë scholars and fans will know that some of the film’s events (including the central romance) are pure inventions but, on the whole, they don’t seem too jarring. Unlike the recent Netflix “adaptation” of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which painted the eighteenth-century heroine as a wisecracking millenial, Emily keeps to the essence of what makes Brontë-land tick: high passion, and high emotion. It’s fairly conventional in structure too — no fourth-wall-breaking here — although there is a clever attempt (that could go further) to align the camera with Emily’s perspective, creating oddly angled constantly moving shots that recreate her state of mind and point-of-view.

The film focuses on the author's life from young adulthood to her early death (aged just 30). Emily (played by relative newcomer Emma Mackey, Sex Education, Barbie), as the film paints it, has always struggled to fit in. She’s described as “the strange one” by the village community she lives in. Not interested in fashion or in mooning over the local curates that preach in her father’s church — like her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Anne (Amelia Gething) — she spends her days walking the moors and living in a dream world. A brief but doomed stint as a teacher sees her return home in disgrace and as punishment, she’s forced by her father (Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar) to take French classes with the handsome, but stodgy, parish priest the village girls have taken a shine to (Oliver Jackson-Cohen — The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Lost Daughter). An enemies-to-lovers plot duly ensues…

It’s a film that’s as full of overblown melodrama as the author’s novel is and how you react to it will probably bear some resemblance to how you respond to Wuthering Heights (assuming you’ve read it). There’s lots of walking on the muddy Yorkshire moors in torrential rain, shouting into the abyss on hilltops and a rather nice line in spooky gothic scares (one, in particular, actually made me jump). Some scenes are beautifully done — especially the ones involving the troubled Brontë brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead, Inside No. 9, Dunkirk) who is Emily’s kindred spirit and cheerleader, encouraging her to explore her creative nature. Emily’s experiments with opium and alcohol, courtesy of Branwell create some of the most interesting points in the film (however unlikely) where we understand how pieces of the world around her start to weave together into the narrative of her great novel. This representation of her imagination at work is far more appealing than the premise that her masterpiece must have come from real-life heartbreak, rather than an inventive mind. Overlong and patchy at times — depicting Charlotte as the jealous, narrow-minded counterpoint to Emily’s artistic free spirit is especially heavy-handed — but overall it’s a fresh and atmospheric take on the Wuthering Heights author, Emily Brontë.