'It’s bullshit. Just experience the film. Like it, or don’t'

And there's plenty more Emily reviews and articles today. Metro gives it 4 stars out of 5:

With scant in the way of biographical fact to fetter her, O’Connor lets her imagination rip. This Emily is the brilliant, sensitive, wild-eyed heroine every Kate Bush-loving teenage girl aspires to be – not least because she looks like Emma Mackey. [...]

‘There’s something ungodly in your writing – I feel it when we’re together,’ declares the hunky new curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) both sisters madly fancy.

Yes, it’s their very own ‘Hot Priest’. Cue ungodly amount of hay rolling while the score’s strings explode in a frenzy. None of which probably happened. Which may bother you, or it may not.

Unevenly paced, but ravishing to the eye, it’s a movie that could be ripped from the pages of Vogue. The cinematography is sublime. Some bits work (one incredible séance scene suggests O’Connor missed her calling as a horror director), others don’t so much.

But it’s ambitious and almost painfully heartfelt. Less a movie and more a sensational example of Brontë fan fiction. (Larushka Ivan-Zadeh)

4 stars out of 5 from The Irish Examiner:

Eschewing historical rigor for creative reimagining (an early glimpse of Emily’s copy of Wuthering Heights with ‘Emily Brontë’ rather than her pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’ on the spine confirms that Frances O’Connor won’t be constrained by factual details), Emily is as wildly passionate an affair as the celebrated novel, in which the tempestuous author is herself the inspiration for Cathy and Heathcliff. 

Emma Mackey is in superb form here, by turns aloof, manic and vibrant as she embodies the irrepressible Romanticism that inspired Wuthering Heights, and she gets very strong support from Alexandra Dowling as the self-consciously respectable Charlotte, and Fionn Whitehead as the debauched libertine Branwell. 

Wuthering Heights fans might be disappointed that the fabled Yorkshire Moors are a little on the tame side, but for the most part Emily is a torrid and earthily poetic portrait of one of English literature’s true mavericks. (Declan Burke)

4 stars from Independent (Ireland):

Is Branwell the model for Heathcliff or Hareton Earnshaw, Cathy’s hard-living brother? Might the fey but secretly horny Reverend Weightman be a proxy for that milksop Edgar Linton, and is Emily herself Cathy? Or maybe a female Heathcliff?

This constant teasing at the great story Emily conjured from nowhere is subtly done, and very enjoyable. With so many gaps in her heroine’s biography, O’Connor is forced to invent: the real Charlotte Brontë may not have been so jealous of her sister’s talent that she fell down weeping on the good carpet after reading Wuthering Heights and sobbed over and over, “I hate you”.

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published first, yet here it’s Emily who’s the trailblazer, giving her timid older sister the courage to have a go at writing herself.

The real Emily may not have had any actual sexual experience, which might explain the furious passion in her novel.

But none of that poetic licence matters because O’Connor’s film has been faithful to the strange essence of Emily Brontë’s prose, and given us a haunting and beautiful film that may, who knows, be approximate to the truth of her life. (Paul Whitington)

3 stars out of 5 from Evening Standard:

Emma Mackey is splendiferous in this frequently scintillating and teen-friendly biopic about Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë. That said, much about Frances O’Connor’s directing debut is disappointing.

O’Connor, who also wrote the screenplay, seems to think that being on Team Emily means sticking the boot into her sisters, Charlotte and Anne. Even worse, she gives Emily a good-in-bed boyfriend. The film wants to be modern, but the logic that underpins it (where there’s passion, there must be a penis) is old hat.

Back to Mackey, who uses the intelligence and guile she displayed in Sex Education to play Emily as an atypical wallflower. Emily seems clenched and gauche, but give her a mask — literally a family heirloom she holds over her face — and she blossoms into someone who can command the room. In a brilliant sequence, Emily appears possessed by the spirit of the Brontë’s mother and what Mackey does with her voice, by turns steely and milky, roots us to the spot. Hers is a blazing performance.

The film’s Emily is most at ease with her big brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) and their larky, anguished and occasionally opium-fuelled encounters are raw and engaging.

O’Connor isn’t trying to be glossy. Scenes cut to black or come to an abrupt end. The arrhythmic pace is fitting.

How tragic that, in the second half, O’Connor loses the plot. We get anachronistic, generically ‘hot’ scenes between Emily and local curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen; doing his absolute best to be more than dashing).

Equally facile is the way Emily’s love-life crumbles as soon as undermining Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) returns.

The film boils down to: creativity is a race and Emily got to the finishing line first! And she had more sex than her sisters! And Charlotte was well jel! In real life, the sisters were team players. Why is that not a story worth telling?

O’Connor, on the basis of this effort, is a talented director and a so-so writer. She showcases the gifts of Mackey but the Brontës deserve better. (Charlotte O'Sullivan)

3 stars out of 5 from What to Watch:

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. [...]

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(opens in new tab) (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. (Louise Okafor)

From Express & Star:

For her impressive feature film directorial debut, O’Connor romanticises and humanises one of 19th-century English literature’s brightest lights, Emily Brontë, who only published one novel, Wuthering Heights, a year before her death from tuberculosis aged 30.

Emily abandons the rigid constraints of a traditional biopic to corrupt timelines and invent a scandalous dalliance between the writer and a curate as the template for the turbulent romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.

Reactions of characters to Emily’s work mirror polarised opinions of the era: younger sibling Anne acknowledges a masterpiece but older sister Charlotte dismisses the writing as “ugly” and the guilt-ridden clergyman laments: “There is something ungodly in your writing.”

There is something delicate and beautiful in O’Connor’s screenwriting, which deftly navigates painful dynamics within the Brontë family through the eyes of a socially awkward loner, who is cruelly nicknamed The Strange One by residents of Haworth. [...]

Anchored by a terrific central performance from Mackey, who captures the writer’s manifold contradictions, Emily is an unconventional character study that employs handheld camerawork to catalyse a feeling of intimacy with the Brontës.

Cinematographer Nanu Segal rejects a chocolate box colour palette for earthy browns and greens to capture the rugged beauty of rain-lashed 1840s West Yorkshire.

“I’ve always been beyond your comprehension and I always will be,” coos the conflicted protagonist.

O’Connor’s picture understands Emily Jane Brontë very well. (Daniel Morris)

From Las Furias Magazine (Spain):

El Festival de Sitges guarda muchas sorpresas y alguna vez se cuela en su programación alguna joya inesperada para un festival de estas características, Emily, el inmejorable debut en la dirección de Frances O’Connor, es una de ellas.

Frances O’Connor rueda con una seguridad y destreza apabullante una de las mejores películas de esta edición. Una obra que se pasa en un suspiro. Como esos episodios de Dragon Ball que no creías que ya se hubieran terminado. Emily se disfruta de principio a fin. Es una película llena de belleza, con unos personajes tan vivos que da la sensación de que puedan salir de la pantalla.

La música, fotografía, vestuario y arte de la película son merecedores de todo tipo de elogios. Su guion, escrito por la propia O’Connor, es una delicia. Todo lo que ocurre, todo lo que fabula y todo lo que dicen, hacen y sienten sus personajes, está escrito con una sensibilidad y maestría difícil de encontrar en el cine de hoy en día. (Xesco Simón) (Translation)

El Punt (in Catalan) finds it brilliant as well.

From HeyUGuys:

Emily the character and Emily the film both come fully alive when she and Branwell are together. Branwell created an infamous portrait of the siblings and later painted himself out. Fionn Whitehead’s moving performance restores his face, form and soul. His presence lights a spark within Emily. Her heightened reactions to the moments of intensity Frances O’Connor has visualised for her perfectly explain how the inexplicable melodrama of Wuthering Heights flowed from her pen. It also goes some way to answering the question Charlotte poses to her in the film’s opening moments as Emily lies dying on the sofa at home.

That sofa. Emily Brontë has been a part of my own life for as long as I can remember. I was supposed to be named after Charlotte but I was born looking like an Emily so Emily I became. I have a thousand Brontë memories, literary and literal – of their moors, their stories, their faces and their tragically short lives – but the most singular is being taken on a peculiar pilgrimage to look at the sofa Emily died on. The image stayed with me, preserved as distinctly as Emily’s writing. It must have lingered with O’Connor too because the camera glances at and frames it uneasily and Nanu Segal’s stunning, soulful cinematography – breathtaking and unrestrained when tracking Emily through the wild outdoors – is at its most intimate in those moments.

Emily Brontë, too often preserved behind glass and page as a tragic prodigy is liberated by O’Connor’s interpretation, Emma MacKey’s passionate embodiment and Segal’s lens. This is a vital and powerful take on the mystery of her too-short life and with less emphasis on the push-me-pull-you dynamics of the Weightman romance and more of the tender, turbulent relationship between the sisters this could have been a pretty remarkable movie. Even without that, Emily still shines. (Emily Breen)

There's also a video of a 'red carpet interview' to Emma Mackey. And more interviews to the cast here.

The Telegraph features Emma Mackey:

Emily is earthed in biographical truth, but it streamlines and shuffles the novelist’s story while spec­u­lating about a number of for­mative experiences, including a torrid love affair with William Weight­man (played by Oliver Jack­son-Cohen), the handsome and popular assistant curate in the ­parish overseen by her father, an Irish Anglican priest. (Charlotte Brontë’s letters suggest that it was actually Anne, the youngest of the sisters, with whom Weightman was enamoured.)

For Mackey, who was raised bilingual by her English-speaking mother and French headmaster father, the role closes an unexpected circle. Although as a teenager she tore through Jane Austen and devoured BBC dramas on satellite television, it wasn’t until she was reading English literature at university that she first encountered the Brontës; then, last spring, she found herself posing as Emily on the same cobbled streets they must have wandered in the village of Haworth, barely an hour from Leeds.

The film is sensational: wild, blustery and trembling with passion. It works so well thanks largely to Mackey, in whose wide, piercing eyes you really do swear you see one of the finest examples of romantic literature taking shape. She has the kind of face that, when projected on a cinema screen, makes you freeze – cool and clear and charged with implication, like the Japanese ceremonial mask the actress dons in Emily’s most ­unsettling scene. In fact, many of the film’s most powerful moments play out in nowhere-to-hide close-up: O’Connor extracts maximum value from her young lead’s ­striking presence, as well as her considerable talent.

“I think I just have a lot of eye,” is Mackey’s self-effacing view. “When I was working with Russell Brand on Death on the Nile, he called me ‘Eye-Face’. I was like, ‘Well, thanks for that.’”

Writing and directing Emily has been a decade-long undertaking for O’Connor, the 55-year-old ­British-Australian actress whose own breakthrough role was as Fanny Price in the 1999 screen adap­tation of Austen’s Mansfield Park. Her script for Emily made Mackey anxious at first because of its “oscillation between reality and fiction”: “I was worried the Brontë fiends were going to be angry be­cause we were taking creative liberties.”

Later, though, Mackey realised that “the film was more exploring the mystery of their lives than providing a straightforward account. Because they’re literary figures, they spark the imaginative muscles in our brains that want to create worlds around people we admire, or who inspire us. And I think the Brontës have that air of mystery.”

The aforementioned mask incident, invented by O’Connor, is a case in point. One night at the parsonage, Emily puts on this heirloom that once belonged to the sisters’ late mother, Maria, and appears to become possessed by her spirit – though whether this is mischief or meltdown or an actual occult visitation is open to question. O’Connor asked Mackey to perform the scene repeatedly, in different ways – “some where she was toying with her sisters, some where she really did feel moved by her mother’s ghost” – then cut the various takes together, to uncanny effect. Watching the film last month, Mackey says that even she was no longer sure what to believe. [...]

She points to the first amorous encounter between Emily and Jackson-Cohen’s hunky curate, in which Emily’s undergarments have to be laboriously unlaced: not the kind of stuff you can convincingly busk. “I loved that in that world, your first time entails a lot of faff – the whole ‘God, so many bloody laces!’ ” she cackles. “I mean, when you get to that point, you might as well shag, considering you’ve gone through all of the ordeal.” (Robbie Collin)

Another magazine also features Emma Mackey:

Mackey excels in Emily, a weighty, intense, 1840s-set movie about the famously lonely author of Wuthering Heights. Except in O’Connor’s screenplay, Emily Brontë gets her own sex education from William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a clergyman and French tutor who puts extra care into the oral examinations. Historical documents may suggest Emily died at 30 without romance, but Emily posits that the second-youngest Brontë sibling was getting laid – and with a hymn-singing himbo. [...]

“It’s not a biopic and it shouldn’t be sold that way,” the actor tells me in Rosewood Hotel, in early October. “It’s a retelling. It’s Frances’s interpretation, and she’s deeply passionate about Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights. It’s done with a lot of bravery and sensitivity … It’s an interweaving of the images from that novel into her life.”

Mackey is, it seems, an honest interviewee. She resists the urge to fabricate a story about a long, deep connection with Wuthering Heights – it’s just a book she enjoyed. Likewise, when I mention that Ana de Armas claimed to receive the blessing of Marilyn Monroe for Blonde, Mackey responds, “I’m not spiritual.” Instead, Mackey is more passionate about the filmmaking process behind Emily, which was shot with handheld cameras, natural lighting, and timely rain on location in Haworth. “It was evocative visiting the parsonage, and seeing that Emily’s bedroom looked out onto a graveyard,” she says. “Her whole life, she woke up to graves.”

An early highlight is when Emily puts on a mask and convinces a crowded kitchen that she’s possessed by her dead mother. For a moment, you’re watching The Exorcist. “Suddenly you’re not in a costume-drama. You’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ I love that undertone of the supernatural that they were so fascinated with at the time. That gothic element carries its weight in the film.” [...]

“I understand that people are bothered by (the romance),” Mackey says. “But it doesn’t matter! It’s an interpretation, not a documentary. It’s Frances’s vision. She wanted to show a young woman trying to find her authentic voice, but knowing she always had it. There’s also a dreamscape in the film. You never know what genre you’re really in. It’s supernatural, or there’s the very real, gritty Yorkshire weather that I’m running up and down hills in.

“When Emily is writing Wuthering Heights, and it’s just a pen and paper – it’s just Emily Brontë. It doesn’t matter if she experienced this stuff or not. It’s up to you to decide. It’s not prescriptive. People keep trying to tell us there are rules. But they’re making films and telling stories. It’s bullshit. Just experience the film. Like it, or don’t.” (Nick Chen)

France24 quotes some of Emma Mackey's comments on the film and Emily Brontë:

Was reclusive 19th-century author Emily Brontë inspired to write "Wuthering Heights" after experimenting with opium, tattoos and a steamy affair with the local clergyman?

Actress Emma Mackey doesn't think so -- but she portrays Bronte doing all those things and more in "Emily," a new drama which deliberately ignores the trappings and conventions of the traditional period biopic.

"No. I don't. But also, I don't care!" the star, best known for Netflix hit "Sex Education," told AFP.

"It's not a documentary -- I had to wrap my head around just letting go of all the biographical elements, and really hold on to the fact that this is just a story" that writer-director Frances O'Connor "wanted me to tell," she said.

The question of how a shy Victorian woman who spent most of her short life on the remote Yorkshire moors penned a dark, passionate Gothic novel that shocked its contemporary readers has long vexed academics and fans

"Emily," released Friday by Warner Bros in the United Kingdom, offers a non-literal answer, allowing elements of "Wuthering Heights" to "seep in and feed that real world" of its author, said Mackey. [...]

According to Mackey, in reality Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne probably drew their complex creative ideas from the extensive library of books, including Gothic literature, that they had access to growing up.

But, she notes, there were macabre elements in the Brontë family's real world too.

"Emily Brontë's actual room looks onto a graveyard in Haworth (in Yorkshire)... I think that innate morbidity was 100 percent there," she said.

The sisters would have seen people in the nearby mill town "dying of TB (tuberculosis) from the water that is infected by your own graveyard," Mackey added.

"Death was everywhere. They saw kids dying. It was very tangible to them." [...]

While she does not view Emily Brontë -- who wrote under a male pseudonym -- as a feminist per se, Mackey sees the movie as "a thank you for the impact that she's had on people, and women, and readers across the world, still today."

"There's something fascinating about a recluse and someone who is shrouded in mystery," said Mackey.

"It's like having a 'Do Not Enter' sign on your door. You want to enter and you want to see what's behind the door."

The Guardian features Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays William Weightman.

Though it bucks the recent trend for millenialised period dramas (think, string versions of Ariana Grande on Bridgerton and Dakota Johnson’s Fleabag-esque breaking of the fourth wall in Persuasion), it still manages to capture the Victorian era through a modern sensibility. Emily, who died of tuberculosis at 30, is portrayed as a sensitive rebel and misfit who broke free of the shackles of society to live authentically.

“Emily Brontë, or definitely our interpretation of her, is hugely relatable,” said Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays William Weightman, a handsome parish curate who moves to town, excites the women and ultimately becomes Brontë’s illicit lover.

“There’s something quite contemporary about the film. It talks about all the things that are still incredibly relatable to a younger audience. Feeling like an outcast in society, being told you have to conform, fighting against that, and having the strength to stand by who you are.”

The film seeks to connect Brontë’s reclusiveness and emotional volatility to trauma and depression – issues that were rarely, if ever, taken seriously in the 19th century. “To look at it from a modern-day perspective, Emily clearly had some form of mental health issue,” Jackson-Cohen said.

The 35-year-old actor, who rose to fame after leading roles in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, said Brontë was “ferocious, in an incredible way” and paid tribute to her “bravery to step outside the mould at that time. Still to this day, there’s pressure to keep us in boxes. She clearly was an extraordinary woman.” [...]

“Weightman arrived in Haworth and was a bit of a charmer,” Jackson-Cohen said. “It’s true he wrote Valentine’s cards to all three Brontë sisters, and he actually ended up forming a very close bond with Anne. There were letters about her nursing him just before he died. The film takes that idea and says: ‘What if it had been Emily?’

“I think there’s something always quite interesting about forbidden love. I’m not religious, so in preparation for the role I spoke to so many priests and pastors to get an understanding of what it’s like to live with these rules. For these people, to have their faith questioned because of their own desire must have felt like an earthquake.” [...]

“What’s interesting about this film is there are all these characters which aren’t necessarily likable, they’re incredibly flawed, much like Wuthering Heights itself.

“I don’t know if I’d classify Weightman as toxic. He behaves badly, but hopefully the understanding is it’s because of society at the time, him protecting his faith, and also the scandal that would have ensued for both him and Emily. If you think back, there was no space in society for women to be sexually active without being married. And for men, and specifically a clergymen.”

Jackson-Cohen also commended O’Connor’s immersion into the Brontë sisters’ life. “The love that she has for the sisters’ work makes this film unique,” he said.[...]

“But the film isn’t a biopic by any means,” Jackson-Cohen said. “It’s an ode to Emily’s imagination. It cracks open the idea of creativity and what may or may not have inspired her to write this novel that still to this day is so highly revered.” (Nadia Khomami)

The Guardian also includes the film in its 'guide to this week’s entertainment'. And so does The Times.

A few sites do some fact-checking by reminding readers that while the film may be worth seeing it is not actually based on a true story: Good to Know, Digital Spy... The Times even has John Mullan discuss the matter ('Did Emily Brontë have a passionate love affair? No, don’t be daft') rightly concluding that the novel is 'n act of pure imagination'.

But O’Connor’s determination to find the wellspring of Emily Brontë’s literary creation in her own experiences sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Her Emily has to be an utterly solitary author, incomprehensible even to her sisters. Charlotte Brontë has been made prissy and unimaginative, ready to spout exactly the judgments voiced by conservative Victorian critics. “It’s an ugly book.” You would never know that Charlotte and Anne were also writing novels, or that the three women published a volume of poems together. In Emily, Charlotte puts pen to paper only after Emily’s death, inspired by her example. In fact, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published before Wuthering Heights. In the film, Anne is a perplexed witness to Emily’s creative inner storms; in reality, her novel Agnes Grey (also regarded as shocking by reviewers) was published as a companion volume to Wuthering Heights.

Buzzfeed lists where you have have seen the cast of Emily before.

Onto other Brontë matters now. The Reviews Hub gives 4 1/2 stars out of 5 to The Moors as staged at Hope Theatre in London.

A big old house on the moors is the setting for this weird, dark, thoughtful but uneven play. Taking inspiration from the letters of Charlotte Brontë, written on the edge of the dark sandstone landscape of West Yorkshire, the piece is shot through with bleakness and isolation. What starts out fairly simply as a small but strange family wanting a live-in governess for a child turns into a narrative about manipulation, breakdown, departures from the rules of time and space, and violence.( Karl O’Doherty)

The Bubble looks into 'the literary legacy of the witch'.

However, in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, filled with elements of the fairy tale, the witchy and supernatural seem to suggest resistance to patriarchy: Jane labels herself ‘half fairy, half imp’ in a moment of defiance. Her prophetic dreams and visions connect her to Bertha, creating a link with female opposition and disruption. The epithets that describe Jane (‘elf’, ‘witch’, ‘changeling’ and ‘fairy’) empower her through a sense of spiritualism – she ‘bewitched’ Rochester’s horse, undeniably asserting a mystical influence. (Edie Gilmour)

The Atlantic describes Wide Sargasso Sea as one of 'some breathtakingly brief novels are among the best English literature has to offer'. News Es Euro (Spain) recommends reading Wuthering Heights this autumn. L