A very good yarn indeed

Rotorua Daily Post (New Zealand) reviews Emily.

Viewers looking for nods to Wuthering Heights or what’s known of Emily Brontë's life story will find things like ghostly trees featuring in a remote Yorkshire landscape, fireside storytelling, violent storms, untimely death, people peering through windows and a neighbouring rich family called the Lintons. And they’ll find the driving force of both Wuthering Heights and Emily is the passion between the two main characters.

Emma Mackey as Emily is riveting and suitably bewitching. The exquisitely tender love scenes involving Emily and her secret love, Mr William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), her father’s new curate, are key to the film’s success.

Many kinds of love hold the Brontë family together, Frances O’Connor shows us. There’s the love the siblings Emily, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Anne (Amelia Gething) and Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) have for their deceased mother, chillingly channelled by Emily in an early scene with a spooky mask. Then there’s the stern kind of love the father (Adrian Dunbar) has for his children and the love of God, and which inspires Mr Weightman’s moving first sermon. [...]

After an overly slow first half hour, Emily becomes an absorbing film. The dialogue is excellent, the acting outstanding. It’s beautifully costumed by Michael O’Connor (European Film Award winner and Bafta Best Costuming nominee for Ammonite, 2020, Francis Lee). Overall, it’s a very good yarn indeed. 

Highly recommended. (Jen Shieff)

AnneBrontë.org features Anne's carnelian necklace. Go into the story discusses the script for Jane Eyre 2011.