In 2011, Andrea Arnold blew the dust off of popular assumptions about high school literature mainstay Wuthering Heights with her visceral, sensual, handheld adaptation, in which the characters’ emotions were chafed as raw as their skin was by the constant ripping of the wind across the moors. Now, in her directorial debut, Emily, Frances O’Connor has made a similarly immediate, though aesthetically distinct, partly fictionalized biopic about the novel’s reclusive author, Emily Brontë (played here by Emma Mackey), who wrote only one novel before dying at the age of 30.
With its surfeit of highly dramatic music by Abel Korzeniowski (working in a heightened mode that recalls his contributions to Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals) and O’Connor’s use of slow-motion, Emily reminds us that directorial and technical choices exist to elevate a screenplay, not just service it. O’Connor takes her own words and plotting, which consist of coming of age and first love story elements, and stirs them up like a conductor into a series of almost frightening crescendos. We know that Brontë’s life was short and tragic but Emily makes us feel as if she already knew of her own doomed fate.
Within the boundaries of the film, that’s actually not entirely out of the question. Those aforementioned emotional crescendos aren’t the only things here that are frightening. As mentioned, this is a partly fictionalized account of Brontë’s life and thus O’Connor is perfectly within her license to inject hints of the supernatural throughout Emily. In an early scene, the invocation of the family’s dead matriarch seems to cause a sudden gust of wind to burst through the shutters. It’s as unsettling for the viewer as it is for the young siblings.
Then again, maybe that wasn’t the late Mrs. Brontë outside. Maybe it was the combined force of the three sisters’ outsized talents. Much of the film’s psychological friction comes from the battle between the expectations of protocol and etiquette placed upon the daughters of a minister in late Georgian/early Victorian era England and the unbridled messiness of art and those who are compelled to create it.
In the midst of the impressive gale of feelings and stylistic brouhaha conjured up by O’Connor stands Mackey, Emily‘s pillar of strength. She’s been terrific on Netflix’s Sex Education for three seasons now but this feels like a new kind of coming out party. She doesn’t just carry the film on her shoulders. She runs with it.
