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Her film imagines a petty rivalry between the siblings. ![]() Most biographical details are filtered through Charlotte’s voice, published in biographies of the Jane Eyre author, which O’Connor understandably treats as suspect. Using the fictional narrative in Wuthering Heights as a window into Brontë is inevitable for any kind of biography since so little is known about the author. The line between prank and possession is unnervingly blurred, and O’Connor leans into it with a thick soundscape and flickering lighting, finding in this scene some footing for the gothic elements from Wuthering Heights.Įmily is the kind of origin story that imagines antecedents in Brontë’s life to elements of her novel, like a passionate affair or a bitter rivalry – given the subject, these things can go hand in hand. She’s also harboring confused emotions about her dead mother and some warranted anger towards her audience. ![]() There’s a chilling early scene in which Brontë dons a ghostly white mask to perform a haunting for guests but gets carried away by her own storytelling ability. The film empowers Brontë’s sometimes turbulent emotions, setting environments according to the author’s moods in ways that can be riveting. ![]() He showers all his favor on Brontë’s older sister Charlotte and older brother Branwell, whose wayward ways demand special attention from the patriarch. She’s the black sheep in her family, both berated and neglected by her father (Adrian Dunbar), a widower and parish priest. She tends to steal away to private spaces or simply into her own head. Mackey’s Brontë regularly appears sullen or mortified by her surroundings. Hers is a more kinetic film, opting for handheld camera work and editing that follows the rhythms of Mackey’s ferocious performance closely.Įmily covers the years leading up to Brontë writing her novel, which is about cruel and haunted characters who play devastating games with love and social status. It’s also a confident directorial debut for O’Connor, a veteran actor who starred in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park and the BBC’s Madame Bovary, and in turn makes a period piece stripped of the pageantry and stateliness typical of the genre. ![]() They are just facets to this deep-feeling and sharply critical character who the film assumes funnelled her joys, sadness, yearning for tenderness and perspective on human behaviour into Wuthering Heights.Įmily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author. She also doesn’t treat Brontë’s mental and emotional challenges as an obstacle or some unfortunate plague on her short life – the author died from tuberculosis at 30. The characters in the film can’t diagnose these things, but a contemporary audience will spot the signs that O’Connor shrewdly layers into the role played by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey. Instead, Emily feels modern in the way it imagines Brontë’s reclusive demeanor and emotional swings with consideration towards trauma, depression and other possible mental health issues that we have the language for today. Not modern in that post-Bridgerton sense, where Black and brown characters hold positions of power in a fantastical British society stripped of colonial history.
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