An intensely haunting debut feature shirks the path of the biopic and wanders the imagination of a familiar female author.
By Danielle Momoh
4/5 Stars
Emma Mackey as literary giant, Emily Brontë / photo: Warner Bros
Emily is not a perfect film. But, then again, neither is Emily herself. Based on Emily Brontë, a writer most famous for penning the emotionally tasking Wuthering Heights, the story is her journey from inception to page. Unlike the terrible rash of biopics audiences have been inflicted with lately, the writer-director of Emily, Frances O’Connor, does not pretend that it is a factual account of the famous writer’s life. What unfolds in 130 minutes is an ethereal imagining of Emily's life, akin to a fever dream. With apparitions, opium trips, and games taken too far, Emily wades through cloudier waters than your standard biographical drama. It wrenches your heart out of your chest a dozen times over, somehow not alienating you from the film, but steeping you further into it.
The film starts off clumsily, with Emily’s sister Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) asking her outright why she wrote Wuthering Heights. Emily, overcome by illness, does not answer her, staring down the camera until the title card appears and the film drops us right into a flashback. This opening scene does a slight disservice to the rest of the film, attempting to make the path from life to page a linear one. The film itself disavows this, wandering the landscape of Emily's life for 130 minutes, as she wanders the fields behind her house, making us quickly forget the first few minutes of unnecessary structuring. Charlotte is visiting home from school, arriving just as the hot new curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson Cohen) does. Between her sister’s refusal to play their former joint storytelling games and Emily’s own instant dismissal of Weightman, our titular character exists as the most awkward middle child ever put to screen. She only looks up from her toes in the presence of her siblings or the rolling greens of the countryside.
And how gorgeous the countryside is. A penchant for wide shots highlights the swaying grass that always shows up in period dramas, but Emily has a real interest beyond pretty nature shots. Despite how she is treated in her physical home, the fields never desert Emily, holding space for her loneliness and her shining moments of connection. The film is not afraid to stray from this however, swinging from frantic handheld style to a still microscopic view of Emily’s dilating pupils during her opium-fueled romps. For cinematographer Nanu Segal, the way Emily sees is the way we see. Emily’s eyes are so often pinned to the ground, making the weight of a gaze just as important as the turned away face. Emily staring up at the pulpit in her father’s church is more than a direction of the eye, but a nod to her disdain for any chains on her mind, including religious ones. The attention to faces reveals each character's unruly thoughts beneath their (literal and) figurative masks.
The film is committed to oddly contemporary editing, mixing traditional longer takes with rapid jump cuts, that somehow weave the film through genre without a snag. In one childish game, the cuts alone take us from comedy, blindingly gothic horror and aching melodrama, with a breathtaking ending that leaves one almost too shaken to truly take in the next 5 minutes of the film. This is without a doubt one of the shining points of Emily, one that I have not been able to stop thinking about. However, these leaps from tradition do not always pay off. Its use of fades to black are at best an interesting, almost poetic quirk and at their worst, a boring choice that makes the film all the more scattershot. And Emily is frequently scattershot. It usually works, with uses of montage serving to emphasize the futility of Emily’s attempts to be normal. Other times, it exposes the first-time greenness of Frances O’Connor’s script, moving between conflicts too fast to fully sit with the blow the film lays on its audience. But O’Connor still lands those punches, and you feel them in your very core. Even its more obvious betrayals have a sense of helplessness, bringing a layer of desperation to an already tragic film.
Intensity piles on intensity with Emily’s score, switching between a glorious whoops and a playfully sweet piano, to a violin that is intent on drawing you and your every sense in. It should not work, and it would not work in a staunchly traditional period drama. But in Emily, a film that is more gothic than romance, it fits perfectly. Abel Korzeniowski doesn't deny us the strings that one waits to hear every time a lonely girl wanders the countryside in a long dress, but it buttresses it with a rumbling akin to thunder, an urgency that instinctively pushes you to the edge of your seat.
The film also handles the tragedy of the clash between artistry and family, a theme not unseen in recent films. Emily points to an even more difficult state: being an artist in a family of artists. All of Emily’s siblings write, or at least try to in the case of her brother. Yet Emily is still a self-proclaimed odd fish in the still pond of her hometown. Her brother, Branwell Brontë (Fionn Whitehead) is her partner in crime for much of the film, but that relationship slowly turns sour, partly due to the competition inherent to all sibling dynamics– made worse when your favorite sister is your only editor. Period dramas normally show callousness between siblings as an aberration, but in Emily, they recognize that deep love and even deeper resentment go hand in hand. The legacy of all of the sisters’ future careers hang over the film, but somehow manages not to consume it. Their tension still feels real and tangible, their destination to successful writers not negating the rocky path to get there.
The romance is as rich as one can hope to have. I have maintained that nothing does longing like the period drama and if there were ever a movie to prove this, it's Emily. There is no shortage of fleeting glances, hands that graze and secretive smiles in crowded rooms. These grazing hands turn into clasped fingers, heavy stares into completed desires. Emily leans into the dripping repressed sexual tension we expect from period films, but manages to sustain that even after kisses are exchanged. Hands tangled in dishwater. A face buried in a gentle neck. Emily avoids turning sexuality lecherous, focusing on the discovery of pleasure with another, of how all-consuming and freeing it can be.
Mackey and Cohen as Brontë and Weightman / photo: Warner Bros
Emma Mackey and Oliver Jackson Cohen carry this romance and sensuality beautifully, with Cohen bringing an interiority to what could well be another stock righteous period man. His strong gaze clashing with his red cheeks and boyish laugh, visualizing his struggle between being a young artist and being a clergyman. His looks do not disappoint either, his face as noble looking as any Mr. Darcy, his lips pursed to spar with Emily, his hands ready to speak the language of longing. Cohen’s chemistry with Mackey is palpable, with the screen virtually sharpening when they first meet one another, a ring in the air signaling all that is to crackle between them. Their intellectual spats turn into steamy trysts, and then into a frequent convening between lovers. Even under the constraints of occasionally too frequent montages, their love burrows itself into you, making you grow fiercely protective of the two. And for good reason. I don't call this film a tragedy lightly.
Emily carries this tragedy with her every being, turning into a veritable ghost when it gets too much. She shies ways from just being another downtrodden girl, however. She is more than sad– she is wretched. Either tying her emotions up into herself, her spine going straight as an arrow, or going wild-eyed and crumbling, begging and pleading, all her pride gone. She is changeful, depressed, imminently odd and unlike many protagonists, she does not overcome this. Emily does not just flaunt the rules because she is a rebel, her nature is not like others. A character yells at Emily, “There is something ungodly in your writing!” And the film does not exactly dispel this accusation, instead suggesting perhaps the ungodly lies in Emily herself.
photo: Warner Bros
Emma Mackey carries Emily's sorrow with quiet ferocity I have only previously seen in Mia Wasikowska’s Jane Eyre. The Sex Education star turns a haunting performance here, bringing a helpless surety to Emily that most would get confused by. She walks the tightrope between a doormat and a rabid dog of a girl that is pacing around her cage. Longing to be set free, but shying away whenever the cage door is open. It is quite trendy to describe one’s female character as ‘complex’, but Mackey truly renders flesh from the page. You don't need to know the story of Emily Bronte to walk in Emily’s shoes. In fact, it may be better not to. Make no mistake, this is not a documentary about one of the Brontë sisters. This leans closer to a Shakespearean tragedy, to Wuthering Heights itself. Some will no doubt call it fanfiction of one of the most studied female authors. Others will call it a loose interpretation of real life events. I call it a ghost story about a girl I once knew. A girl that flitted around in the rain, stumbling and occasionally finding her footing, not caring to watch her step. A girl called Emily.
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