‘Emily’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Frances O’Connor. UK/US. 2022. 130 mins.

There was no loftier ambition for a woman in 19th century England than a life of quiet respectability. Emily Bronte spends her short life fighting body and soul against that assertion in Frances O’Connor accomplished feature debut. The perceptive imagined life of the central character, and a luminous performance from Emma Mackey, create a distinguished literary biography on a par with Bright Star (2009) and A Quiet Passion (2016). Emily should prove a solid arthouse performer, with a Toronto world premiere followed by a UK and Ireland release through Warner Bros. on October 14.

Cinematographer Nanu Segal uses a muted palette, creating an unobtrusive feel for the period

Bronte’s shy, reclusive nature, her death at 30 and the unreliable memories of her sister Charlotte have left few traces to guide a biographer. Previous cinematic interpretations include Devotion (1946), with Ida Lupino as Emily and Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte, and The Bronte Sisters (1979), with Isabelle Adjani as Emily, Marie-France Pisier as Charlotte and Isabelle Huppert as Anne. An actor for thirty years, O’Connor has crafted a speculative but convincing portrait of a woman influenced by landscape and circumstance, fuelled by imagination and losing herself to an overwhelming passion the equal of anything in Wuthering Heights, the solitary novel in Emily’s literary legacy.

The tale begins with a dying Emily (Mackey), her features waxen and yellowish in the timid glow of candlelight. An exchange with her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) hints at the rivalry and resentment that mark their relationship. “How did you write Wuthering Heights?” Charlotte demands. “I took my pen and put it to paper,” replies Emily. “There is something more, something you are hiding from me,” claims Charlotte.

That deathbed exchange becomes a familiar cue for extended flashbacks covering Emily’s life. She is one of three daughters living in a Yorkshire parish with her curate father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar). There is the expectation she might have a future as a teacher or, failing that, keeping house for her father.

Emily is depicted as a lonely, isolated figure. Socially awkward, she seems happiest lost in a book or creating stories of her own. She is a mixture of the introverted and the brazen. O’Connor offers an atmospheric sense of the bleak Yorkshire moors in which Emily lives. Rain is a constant feature in her life, herding everyone indoors and burdening a funeral with extra melancholy. The wind howls, gnarled trees are stooped under the weight of the grey clouds. Cinematographer Nanu Segal uses a muted palette, creating an unobtrusive feel for the period in unglamorous shots of soggy nature in the wild. Interiors lit by candle and lamp carry a sepulchral gloom.

We understand that Emily is a product of these landscapes, this climate and a life without a mother’s care. She is constantly told not to bring shame on the family and cruelly reminded that she is known as The Strange One in the local village. Dowling’s Charlotte weaves through the film dispensing vinegary disapproval as Emily flaunts convention and begins to find her voice.

Emily sees the key to understanding its main character in two vital relationships. The first is with her dissolute, black-sheep brother Branwell, beautifully played by Fionn Whitehead. His merry mischief-making and iconoclastic bravado bring her out of her shell, even to the point of taking opium. The second is with handsome curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who is appointed as her French tutor. A romance slowly consumes them that is as passionate and fraught as that between Cathy and Heathcliff.

O’Connor places a lot of faith in Mackey. Framed by an array of bonnets and ribbons, she is subject to the constant scrutiny of close-ups. Her eyes convey a sense of alertness to the moods of others and a secret interior life that few will be privileged to share. Emily’s whole life is like a gathering storm. Mackey convinces us that there are so many more colours to Emily than the ones she is allowed to display. Her thoughtful, understated performance matches a film that teases out the flesh-and-blood emotions from the stuff of gothic romance.