Emily Brontë is in cinemas throughout the UK today and we have quite a few reviews.
The Times gives it 5 stars out of 5!
The Brontë children, however, still feel the lingering absence of their mother, who died from cancer when Emily was three. Her father’s handsome new assistant, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), at least provides some distraction and even joins them in a jaunty midnight version of Who Am I?, where players don a white porcelain mask while adopting the personae of famous figures (Charlotte chooses Marie Antoinette). Emily’s turn proves to be a show-stopper, and elevates the film to something far more visceral and genuinely profound. To say anything else would be to ruin one of the movie moments of 2022, with O’Connor orchestrating a scene that rapidly vacillates between outright horror and the yearnings of four grieving siblings, desperate to re-embrace childish things. It’s a genuine coup de cinema.
The rest of the film is just as strong. (...)
It’s a virtuoso technical achievement too. The sound design is phenomenal. Wightman’s sermon on rain and nature makes Emily (and us) hear rising rain on the soundtrack, which stops abruptly when Weightman, primly, mentions God. The music from the Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski (Nocturnal Animals) shifts effortlessly between the rhythmic intensity of Michael Nyman and the lush romance of John Barry. The performances are uniformly flawless, with Mackey, after enlivening Death on the Nile and Eiffel, finally receiving a weighty central role worthy of her talents. (Kevin Maher)
[...] a film that offers a very refined, literary kind of fan service with its sensual, sideways and entirely speculative imagining of a few chapters from Emily Brontë’s short life. Taking all kinds of liberties with the biographical facts, Frances O’Connor’s debut as a writer-director (she’s best known as an actor) nevertheless posits a quite plausible version of Emily.
As embodied by the magnetic Mackey (recently seen in Sex Education and Eiffel), this Emily is not like the other foxes in the litter. But while she is wilder, she’s also smart enough to hold her own in a theological argument, in French no less, with handsome new curate Mr Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). She’s also disciplined enough to squeeze in writing poetry and prose when not cleaning, cooking or doing laundry.
Given our understanding of passion as a destructive as well as creative force in Emily Brontë’s surviving writings, we can buy that she’d end up having a torrid sexual relationship with the eminently seducible Weightman. While it lasts, the bodice-unlacing, crinoline-shedding and irrepressible but illicit desire makes for some of the hottest mid-19th-century shagging scenes since The Piano. It’s even more credible and Brontë-ian that it would end badly, with a very novelistic epistle that doesn’t arrive in time.
However, the film’s imagining of an Emily who experiments with opium, prompting Requiem for a Dream-style extreme close-ups of dilated pupils, and gets a tacky arm tattoo is a serious mis-step, as is a corny deathbed pabulum, straight from the song “Nature Boy”, about the importance of loving and being loved.
But the exceptional craftsmanship of the film washes away most of those sins, especially Abel Korzeniowski’s swooning, keening score, Nanu Segal’s dreamy, candlelit cinematography and Michael O’Connor’s costume design — especially those hats. (Leslie Felperin)
This stark, impassioned period piece, directed and written by the actress Frances O’Connor, certainly contains a healthy amount of buffeting. In fact, it isn’t long before Emily and Weightman find themselves half-tempted, half-swept into a deserted cottage out on the moors, where they shed the many layers of clothing required to endure the Yorkshire climate.
Did this actually happen, let alone inspire the love triangle between Catherine Earnshaw, the kind Edgar Linton and the tempestuous Heathcliff? For O’Connor’s film, it’s beside the point. Emily isn’t a straightforward literary biopic, but a self-declared mixture of fact, speculation and fiction – an attempt to imagine the kind of short but turbulent 19th-century life from which a book such as Wuthering Heights might have leapt. [...]
Yet perhaps it’s alone that Mackey most feels like a star in the making. O’Connor and her cinematographer Nanu Segal keep returning in close-up to her face, whose stark, angular beauty feels tensely at odds with the gentle earth tones of everyday parish life. [...]
Scholars may bridle at the fudging of certain historical details: for instance, here Charlotte doesn’t start writing her own first novel, Jane Eyre, until after Emily’s death. But that’s in service of the film’s enticing view of its subject’s genius as a sort of haunting – something that passes from sister to sister, and author to reader, like a restless ghost. (Robbie Collin)
It’s easy to read Emily here as neurodivergent, possibly autistic, as multiple academics have suggested. But O’Connor allows that interpretation to exist without enforcing it, carefully avoiding reductive depictions. There’s an equal sensitivity in Mackey’s performance. Her brows are often furrowed. Her eyes frequently downcast. She also plays her as a self-knowing woman with a profound and intense connection to the world around her.
While Charlotte and Anne swoon over the poetic sermons of William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the village’s new curate, Emily finds his words phony and trite. But when her father demands that she take French lessons from the clergyman, their heated philosophical debates quickly take on a carnal nature. It makes sense, really – the author of one of the most impassioned books ever written deserves an equally impassioned biopic. Mackey and Jackson bring true, tortured desires to their scenes, especially as they hungrily tear through the many layers of her voluminous gowns.
Emily, pointedly, does not wallow in the misery we like to ascribe to her short and frequently tragic life. There is great buoyancy and humour in the film. Here the Yorkshire moors – so dark and stormy in Wuthering Heights – are an equal source of wonderment and solace. The camera swims in Mackey’s eyes, in bold and confrontational close-ups, while Abel Korzeniowski’s score is a battle cry of violins which, at times, deliberately overwhelms the dialogue. O’Connor, in a sense, has challenged us to meet Emily on her own terms, even if those around her would not. “It’s an ugly book,” Charlotte says of Wuthering Heights. “Good,” Emily replies. At that moment, I could have cheered out loud. (Clarisse Loughrey)
Cinematographer Nanu Segal makes terrific use of the grey skies and Yorkshire landscape. Michael O’Connor’s costumes are cleverly character-coded; Emily’s dresses are as rugged as Charlotte’s are fussy. The ensemble, including Adrian Dunbar as the Brontë patriarch, is a credit to casting director, Fiona Weir. Mackey, in particular, is a powerhouse. The young star is matched well with O’Connor’s carefully calibrated, appealingly earnest script, which approximates a modern sensibility without striking a false note or straying from Emily’s contemporaneous moors. (Tara Brady)
And this beguiling film imagines how her short life might have inspired her to write it.
It is mostly speculation, verging, at times, on mischief. We know little about Emily compared with most other cherished literary figures, but writer-director Frances O’Connor has rather brilliantly converted that dearth of knowledge from a drawback into an opportunity. O’Connor is best-known as an actress, indeed she played Fanny Price in the highly regarded 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park, which cleverly incorporated aspects of Jane Austen’s own story.
She shakes up that equation in Emily, injecting elements of Wuthering Heights into Brontë’s life. The result, while it might greatly affront scholars, is a film brimming with warmth, heart and intelligence. Remarkably, it is O’Connor’s directorial debut.
The sibling she is closest to is Branwell (splendidly played by Fionn Whitehead), an alcoholic and opium addict, whose free spirit she admires. But it is another man who truly bewitches her. This is the handsome new curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who in real life was a protege of Reverend Brontë and a lodger in the family home. Yet there is no evidence that Emily had a crush on him, still less that the pair had a raging love affair.
At first, that seems unlikely even on screen. There’s another marvellous scene in which Weightman preaches for the first time, and the effect on the young women in the congregation reminded me of another recent movie, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Of the sisters, it is Charlotte who appears to have fallen for the curate. Emily mistrusts him. But soon he is teaching her French (making the most of Mackey’s bilingualism) and a romantic spark ignites into a full-blown conflagration.
Their affair unfolds in a tumbledown cottage on the wild and rain-lashed moors, an overt nod to Wuthering Heights and an opportunity for cinematographer Nanu Segal that she does not squander. It’s a handsome-looking film, with lots of hand-held camera work that somehow fits the narrative, and a beautifully acted one.
But neither would be enough without a superb script, which partly through a sprinkling of anachronisms (I don’t suppose any of the Brontës ever said ‘give it some welly’), makes the story feel modern. That can undermine a period drama (see, or rather don’t, the ghastly Netflix version of Persuasion), but here it gives the film buoyancy and relevance. Emily is really worth seeing. (Brian Viner)
Also 4 out of 5 stars from
Express:
This is an Emily Brontë for the social media generation, an outsider, looked upon as “strange” in her Yorkshire moorland village of Haworth. Played with dazzling confidence by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey, this Emily would have been massive on TikTok, with her coquettish smirks, disdain for the pedestrian, and iron-clad opinions.
The writer-director admits her film is not true to the known facts but put your nagging doubts to one side and you’ll get swallowed up by two hours of cinematic intensity. [...]
What really happened out on the moors a couple of hundred years ago we will never know.
But Brontë’s influence beats through the ages, in every psycho-sexual drama and on and on as far as the vampiric Twilight movies and to the Brontë Balti in downtown Haworth.
O’Connor shows us, controversially and brilliantly, how this might have come about. (Denis Mann)
Also 4 stars out of 5 from
RTÉ (Ireland):
Frances O'Connor’s ambitious directorial debut takes creative liberties in portraying the mysterious literary figure behind Wuthering Heights. In doing so, she carefully reminds viewers not to judge a book by its cover.
With little or no details of her short-lived life, O’Connor’s confident direction and deep respect for the narrative transcends clichés to become a genuinely moving examination of what it really means to choose one’s way.
Anchored by Emma Mackey’s superb performance as the woman in question, the richly fictionalised tale acquaints viewers with the suffocated identity of a repressed young writer battling to take charge of her own story. [...]
O'Connor’s disciplined filmmaking radiates a poetry in her storytelling, finding powerful sentiments in every chapter.
The subtlety of Abel Korzeniowski’s score captures Emily’s resounding determination, while Michael O’Connor’s sumptuous, but never fussy, costumes fit the bill perfectly.
Cinematographer Nanu Segal’s keen eye captures the gothic gloom with handsomely mounted images of the Yorkshire moors, making sure the emotional intensity of the landscape is kept. A series of deftly composed shots paints a bitter picture of intellectual autonomy in 19th-century England.
Sex Education’s Mackey is the revelation here. She effortlessly inhabits her role as the leading lady and is impeccably cast in a performance that highlights her character’s determination to flout the rules society has set in place.
At over two hours, the film feels drawn out in parts, but it is impossible to shake this understated gem.
O’Connor said she wanted the movie to be "a love letter to women today". Mission accomplished. (Laura Delaney)
Also 4 stars out of 5 from
The Sun:
But while debut director Frances O’Connor gives period drama fans plenty of key elements of the genre, she also subverts it enough to make Emily feel different.
For a start, this biopic is not a biopic because O’Connor imagines what might have inspired Emily’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, and isn’t too concerned with historical detail. [...]
What really sets Emily apart from the standard fare are a couple of incredibly intense scenes.
One where Mackey appears to channel a supernatural spirit was so powerful that a chill passed through the auditorium.
She will be offered more prominent roles on the back of this. A supporting cast that includes Line Of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar and Gentleman Jack’s Gemma Jones also impresses.
Literary historians are sure to gripe, but if you want to know about Brontë’s life, go watch a documentary.
If you’re looking for a hat full of passion, go see Emily. (Grant Rollings)
Emily is a film as wild and choppy as its subject’s only published work. Based on the life of Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë, it is a distinctly unfussy film, with neither the old-fashioned primness of so many period pieces nor the anachronistic gilding of modern “updates” such as Bridgerton.
If you are pedantic about history (the majority of this story is made up; in real life we know very little of Brontë, who died at 30 from tuberculosis), you will have lots to quibble over, from the thwarted love affair that Emily (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) has with her father’s tortured curate Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), to her experimentation with opium – but I doubt first-time director Frances O’Connor cares. This is a film about passion, not facts.
It is shot accordingly, navigating the Yorkshire Moors and inclement weather with shaky handheld cameras and a prominent soundscape that veers violently between thunderous rain and birds welcoming the dawn. [...]
O’Connor isn’t quite as inventive with form as style, going down the well-worn biopic route of weaving seminal bits of the work into the artist’s life. It is a fate suffered more by women than men, suggesting that female artists can only create from experience rather than their imagination. Still, it’s at least done here with tremendous elegance. Emily peers into windows (like the ghost of Wuthering Heights’s Cathy) spying on drawing rooms with Branwell, and there is a terrifically spooky scene where she dons a mask in a parlour game, conjuring up the Gothic sensibilities that will make her (posthumously) so famous.
This is an exquisitely shot film, spearheaded by Mackey’s intense and expansive performance. A blustery period piece, however loose with the truth, it is one that Brontë herself might have liked. (Francesca Steele)
Actor turned writer and director Frances O’Connor’s sensitive portrait of author Emily Brontë captures the Victorian era with a modern sensibility. Not in the post-Bridgerton sense, where contemporary manners and ear-catching slang are peppered throughout, or modern in the sense of people of colour holding positions of power and influence in a fantasy Britain stripped of its colonial history, but modern in its sympathetic investigation of a woman’s inner life.
Neatly avoiding period dramas’ most egregious crinoline clichés, Emily is O’Connor’s attempt to frame the emotional power of Brontë’s prose and her famous oddness through the prism of what we now know about depression, trauma, social isolation and other mental health issues for which the language did not exist to describe 150 years ago.
Nobody in Emily takes to a psychiatrist’s couch for a counselling session, but today’s audiences will have no trouble recognising the indicators that O’Connor and her lead Emma Mackey carefully layer throughout this story. [...]
Brontë purists may quibble with the confused timelines and dramatic inventions, but O’Connor’s exploration of a writer’s inner self is strikingly current and beautifully played by the entire ensemble. (John Maguire)
Radio Times has spoken to both Frances O'Connor and Emma Mackey.
Although loosely based on real events, the film is by no means a simple biopic of the legendary novelist, instead blending reality with myth to paint a more speculative portrait of her life before she wrote her landmark work. Understandably, this is an approach that has left O'Connor and Mackey feeling slightly apprehensive about the response from devoted Brontëites.
"I’m a little nervous," O'Connor tells RadioTimes.com during an exclusive interview ahead of the film's release.
"Terrified!" adds Mackey.
"I mean, we kind of knew what we were doing," O'Connor continues. "We knew that it'd probably be a little controversial but that if we did it well enough, and we kind of speak from our heart, that people will understand the intention."
Even if the film isn't entirely based in fact, no one could accuse either O'Connor or Mackey of not doing their research. O'Connor explains that she read just about every biography she could get her hands on before embarking on the project, while Mackey also did an extensive amount of studying, something which proved invaluable when it came to building the foundation for her performance.
"It was so fun to learn all of that stuff," Mackey explains. "I like feeding my brain with lots of facts and things, and it was such a rich world to delve into. But actually, in a way, they were quite separate things. It was great to have all of those books and those biographies, but actually when it got to the shooting of the film, the script became my main priority and so you let all of that go in a way." [...]
Asked about this process of blending fact with fictional elements, O'Connor explains how everything essentially came back to theme.
"The theme of it really is: 'How do you find your voice when you can't see yourself reflected anywhere?'" she says. "And how do you as an artist kind of connect to who you really are when who you really are isn't really appreciated?
"So everything that happens in the film – like you take the mask, for instance, the mask was a real object the Brontë's had. And then when I was developing it, I thought that could actually be a really great symbol for Emily's creativity, it's connected to the mother, connected to the feminine. And so it became this great kind of symbol in a way for creativity."
O'Connor adds: "So that's kind of one way that I worked – I did the research, but then I didn't limit my imagination. I was never going to write a biopic about this subject, I really wanted it to fly, and be something that young people would actually go and see. Biopics in some ways are so like for a particular demographic, and I wanted this film to speak to a lot of young women."
It's certainly true that biopics – and indeed British period dramas more generally – can often have a reputation for being rather stuffy and fussy, adhering to certain formulas and not taking many risks. This was something O'Connor was desperately keen to avoid, while she also aimed to ensure the film didn't feel like "you're watching it in a picture frame".
"I wanted it to feel like we were in there with them," she says. "And we did that with the soundscapes – hearing people breathing, with the birdsong, with the wind. So it felt very immersive. Plus we did this gentle handheld thing, so you feel like we're just documenting these little moments with characters, you're actually really in the room."
This was an approach that also appealed greatly to Mackey, who says that everything felt "very fluid" and "very real" on set.
"In my head. I just wanted to kind of stomp," she laughs. "That image was so potent like I wanted to get the dress dirty. Really that was the starting point for me, I just wanted to trudge through the Moors in a dress and get everything muddy and like have hair in my face!"
"Often I think when you're in a period drama as an actor, people come up, [and say] 'Don't put anything on your dress!'" O'Connor interjects. "And we didn't want to have that on this. We wanted everyone to feel like you could do what you wanted in your clothes." (Patrick Cremona)
Express, apart from the review quoted above, also has a more in-depth article on Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights and the film itself.
So far as we know the real Emily Brontë led a relatively sheltered life, but this Emily enjoys sex, drugs and, although rock ’n’ roll is some way off in the future, she is a demon on the piano. She even gets a tattoo.
The writer and director Frances O’Connor, previously best known as an actor, has made clear the film is a free-flowing mix of fact and fiction, a reimagining of Emily’s life.
But we are left in no doubt that O’Connor, who has been developing this project for the past decade, is more than a little in love with her subject.
As the episode makes clear, many laces have to be undone, much to the frustration of Emily and her 19th-century “hot priest” – desperate to be naked and in each other’s arms. In fact, it perfectly sums up the new film. And anyone expecting Emily to be a sober-sided, sedate biopic of the celebrated writer will be disappointed.
So far as we know the real Emily Brontë led a relatively sheltered life, but this Emily enjoys sex, drugs and, although rock ’n’ roll is some way off in the future, she is a demon on the piano. She even gets a tattoo.
The writer and director Frances O’Connor, previously best known as an actor, has made clear the film is a free-flowing mix of fact and fiction, a reimagining of Emily’s life.
But we are left in no doubt that O’Connor, who has been developing this project for the past decade, is more than a little in love with her subject.
“I could’ve told a story that was a straight biography, but I felt that’s been done. I was more interested in finding a way to celebrate who Emily is, that’s connected to Wuthering Heights and is more strongly narrative in a way that is a little like a fairy tale.”
Emily is, in a sense, a Wuthering Heights origin story and O’Connor ingeniously suggests the possible inspiration for a number of elements in one of the greatest novels ever written. [...]
Emily is thrillingly played by French-British actress Emma Mackey, from Netflix’s Sex Education. Mackey is a magnetic screen presence who can convey Emily’s innermost thoughts with a movement of her eyes or a tightening of her expression.
She is the focal point of every scene she’s in, which is most of them. It will be exciting to watch how her acting career and O’Connor’s directing career – this is her directorial debut – progress after this.
The film is filled with subtle details. For example, keep an eye on Emily’s hair – when she wears it down and when she wears it up.
And although the film makes free with facts, there is also much in it that is completely accurate.
For example, all three sisters (Anne is the youngest) really did receive Valentine cards from Weightman, who is very loosely based on the real curate.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things is that there are several laugh-out-loud moments and we don’t usually associate humour with the Brontës’ tragic story. [...]
According to Juliet Barker, acclaimed expert and author of The Brontës: “The known facts of their [Emily and Anne’s] lives could be written on a single sheet of paper.”
Brontë scholar Dr Claire O’Callaghan, author of Emily Brontë Reappraised, told the Express: “Apart from Wuthering Heights and Emily’s poetry and a couple of little diary papers there is no actual other biographical information."
"So there is a massive void when it comes to her personal views on friends, family or whether there was anybody that she was interested in romantically. There’s just nothing there.” [...]
“This film does present Charlotte as very bossy and uptight and a very guarded older sister. But you also get moments of tenderness between them [Emily and Charlotte]. I suspect some Charlotte fans might feel a little bit defensive.”
And some members of “Team Emily” might feel that O’Connor’s artistic licence has tipped over into taking liberties. That would be a shame because the film is certainly true to the spirit of Emily’s work, if not the letter of her life.
Emily is now said to be as brilliant a poet as she was a novelist and she continues to have a huge influence on both high culture and popular culture. [...]
“The Brontës are beloved,” says O’Callaghan. “When you put them on screen and you see the conditions under which they’re writing and the family dynamics, people are just drawn to the story.
“One of the things that is great about this film is the fact that it’s bringing the Brontës and especially Emily to a 21st century audience."
"Emily normally has such a negative press as being difficult and weird but this movie really celebrates the fact that she is a little bit different and that she is her own woman.” (Andrew Jones)
Coincidentally, Claire O'Callaghan has also written an article on '
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë and the truth about the ‘real-life Heathcliff’' for
The Conversation.
But did a real-life romance inspire Emily Brontë’s only novel? According to Frances O’Connor’s new film, Emily, the answer is yes. But the historical picture is far more murky.
The film presents a romantic origin story to account for Brontë’s iconic novel. While reclaiming Emily as a rebel, misfit and the weirdest of the “weird sisters”, as Ted Hughes memorably called them, the film departs knowingly from historical fact, mixing biography with Brontë mythology and dramatic invention to present a very different picture. Australian-British director O'Connor has described her film as putting Emily at the centre of her own story.
This Emily is a rum-and-gin-drinking, opium-fuelled young woman, whose life was, in O'Connor’s vision, a version of Wuthering Heights. [...]
The origins of Wuthering Heights can actually be found in Emily’s poetry, particularly her verse emerging from Gondal, the imaginary world she co-created with Anne. But even in the absence of evidence, many persist to attribute the novel’s magnetism to an imaginary lover for Emily Brontë rather than to her own powerful imagination. William Weightman may be the current candidate in the frame, but he will not be the last.
Ilkley Gazette looks back on the time 'When the new Emily Brontë film production team descended on Wharfedale'.
There is such a buzz on a film location. So many people and so much equipment appears as it were overnight and by the next day it is all gone! So it was on 4 June 2021 when Tempo Productions took over Farfield Friends Meeting House for the day to film a scene from the recently-released film, ‘Emily’, based on the life of Emily Brontë. [...]
Farfield Meeting House, a preserved 1689 meeting house belonging to the Historic Chapels Trust, is normally a peaceful, secluded place, a place for a quiet sit down while walking the Dales Way between Addingham and Bolton Bridge. The film company had scouted it the previous autumn and felt that it could represent a small Sunday schoolroom where Emily taught. The majority of the filming had been centred on Haworth and the moors and this was, I believe the only location in Wharfedale.[...]
The scene was one of a meeting between Emily [Emma Mackey] and William Weightman [Oliver Jackson-Cohen], her love interest for the film’s purposes. Every so often the actors would appear, the lights would be switched on and directed through gauzes to provide the ‘sunlight’ though the windows, and the cameras would roll. Between times there would be talking, adjustments to lighting, make-up and costumes and a lot of waiting around.
The photo shows one such period, a conversation between the two actors, sitting on the 17th-century chest tombs in Farfield burial ground
. (Chris Skidmore)
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