Review: Emily

In many ways, the eponymous Emily from Frances O’Connor’s recent film about the Wuthering Heights Brontё feels like a profoundly modern woman. Although the film is situated in the coarse and tangled moors surrounding Haworth, Yorkshire, where Brontё grew up, and laden with those gorgeous visual signifiers of Victorianism, its protagonist is out of time.

Firstly, Emily’s ideas are bold and dangerous. Her love for the tormented, woe-is-me pastor is  fervent, sexual, explicit, and distinctly removed from any doting, passive perception of Victorian girlhood and romance. She is interested in monsters, she has dark and morbid fascinations (particularly realised in an epic, genuinely creepy mask sequence). She won’t become a governess, she won’t follow her more conforming, easy sisters Charlotte and Anne through tunnelled routes from church to the school house. She is posited as an alien to the close village society that encases her family’s life; she is dislocated from that easy, stuffy perception of Victorianism. 

Secondly, there is the sense that O’Connor’s Emily can speak to women today. The dismissal and condescension Emily faces within the village, and which is enhanced within the home, emboldens her resistance and her sureness in herself. Charlotte, at one point, shouts in Emily’s face about how ‘weird’ and ‘strange’ she is and Emily, although wounded, unfalteringly continues. Her emotionality and distinct sense of self are tentatively unravelled by O’Connor. Ultimately, Emily does not conceal her ‘difficultness’. 

This is not without the help of Emma Mackey, alumnus of both Sex Education’s Moordale High and the University of Leeds(!).  Mackey convincingly portrays the furiousness, intensity, volatility and sensitivity of Emily – she is like a glorious Maeve on steroids. (Side note: in this, Mackey also proves herself to thrive freestanding of the series). Equally, Oliver Jackson-Cohen is the perfectly repressed English Gentleman™, while Fionn Whitehead offers an appropriately scrambled and messy interpretation of the tragic, Byronic Brontё brother, Branwell. 

Cinematography, sound, and location also hold bearing on the viscerality of the film. Because Emily draws so much of herself from the outdoors, it is only right that the film often focalises on sweeping vistas of the Yorkshire Moors. Many times, Emily, alone atop a crag, or perhaps with Branwell, overlooks the valley in moments of poignant reflection. This, coupled with sound that utilises raw elements of wind, rain, trees blowing, and the noises made even on a seemingly ‘still’ day, highlights the intense affinity between Emily and the environment that drives her to create. 

O’Connor crafts Brontё with so much nuance that the woman, often consigned to the mythology of her family legacy and of the role of women in Victorian Britain, can break free. Emily – both the film and its heroine – in many ways hold a mirror to the ways in which women still feel obliged to censor their ‘awkwardness’. More poignantly, though, O’Connor’s Emily also embodies the ways in which women may resist, create, love, and exist.

By Mia Fulford

Featured Image Credit: The Guardian