Actor turned writer-director Frances O’Connor’s sensuous and loosely biographical drama about the Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë captures the Victorian era with a modern sensibility.

Not modern in that post-Bridgerton sense, where Black and brown characters hold positions of power in a fantastical British society stripped of colonial history. Instead, Emily feels modern in the way it imagines Brontë’s reclusive demeanor and emotional swings with consideration towards trauma, depression and other possible mental health issues that we have the language for today. The characters in the film can’t diagnose these things, but a contemporary audience will spot the signs that O’Connor shrewdly layers into the role played by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey.

She also doesn’t treat Brontë’s mental and emotional challenges as an obstacle or some unfortunate plague on her short life – the author died from tuberculosis at 30. They are just facets to this deep-feeling and sharply critical character who the film assumes funnelled her joys, sadness, yearning for tenderness and perspective on human behaviour into Wuthering Heights.

Emily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author. It’s also a confident directorial debut for O’Connor, a veteran actor who starred in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park and the BBC’s Madame Bovary, and in turn makes a period piece stripped of the pageantry and stateliness typical of the genre. Hers is a more kinetic film, opting for handheld camera work and editing that follows the rhythms of Mackey’s ferocious performance closely.

Emily covers the years leading up to Brontë writing her novel, which is about cruel and haunted characters who play devastating games with love and social status. Mackey’s Brontë regularly appears sullen or mortified by her surroundings. She tends to steal away to private spaces or simply into her own head. She’s the black sheep in her family, both berated and neglected by her father (Adrian Dunbar), a widower and parish priest. He showers all his favor on Brontë’s older sister Charlotte and older brother Branwell, whose wayward ways demand special attention from the patriarch.

The film empowers Brontë’s sometimes turbulent emotions, setting environments according to the author’s moods in ways that can be riveting. There’s a chilling early scene in which Brontë dons a ghostly white mask to perform a haunting for guests but gets carried away by her own storytelling ability. She’s also harboring confused emotions about her dead mother and some warranted anger towards her audience. The line between prank and possession is unnervingly blurred, and O’Connor leans into it with a thick soundscape and flickering lighting, finding in this scene some footing for the gothic elements from Wuthering Heights. [...]

Rigid historians will have a field day with this and the other guesswork in the film, like Brontë’s leisurely opium use and the central illicit affair she has with William Weightman, a parish curate who lived in the family’s home for a few years. Maybe this affair never happened. If it did, who would ever write about it? In any case, the way O’Connor pairs them together just feels right.

The affair begins with Weightman giving Brontë French lessons, a ferocious tête-à-tête in the language of love. They debate religion. He’s commanding the conversation. She’s limited by her grasp of the vocabulary but fighting to express herself, refusing to blindly believe what she’s been told by pastors – a very Victorian stance. The sequence brims with both sexual tension and animosity, a flurry of contradictory emotions that’s typical for both Weightman and Brontë, which just makes their passion more carnal and involving.

Emily is a sexy movie. O’Connor finds immense pleasure in awkward touches, stolen glances and overdressed characters tearing away at all the layers they have on. At one point, the film lingers on the work Weightman puts into hastily untying Brontë’s corset. It’s a very thoughtful and perhaps feminist bit of on-screen foreplay that isn’t all captured in one shot because of how laborious the process is. And it’s thrilling to watch. (Radheyan Simonpillai)

Of course, Brontë’s blank canvas allure won’t stop purists from scoffing at O’Connor’s Gen Z-friendly decision to cast “Sex Education” star Emma Mackey in the title role (a brilliant idea, it turns out). And those same people will surely be up in arms over her melodramatic vision of how literature’s most famous middle child came to write “Wuthering Heights” — not least of all because it involves getting high on opium and giving a blowjob to the hunkiest new member of the Yorkshire clergy while Abel Korzeniowski’s vortex-like violin score goes absolutely hog wild over the soundtrack.

But such invented splashes of rebellion and romance only add to the ecstatic truth that “Emily” brings to its windswept tale of a stultified woman survived by her inner strength. They’re all the more agreeable in a movie that (mostly) eschews the presentism that’s become so en vogue in Victorian-era adaptation, and resists the urge to go full “Shakespeare in Love” in its suggestion that Brontë lived a bit of “Wuthering Heights” before she put it to paper.

And yet, it’s reasonable to assume that Brontë really did project some of her own suffering onto the tragic saga of Heathcliff and his Catherine, particularly because her lived experience was so narrow. So the trouble for a movie like “Emily” — and the insurmountable challenge that confronts O’Connor’s unremarkable but sensitively rendered script — is that its mere existence implies that someone already turned Brontë’s life into an immortal work of genius that heaves with many of the same ideas. There’s no harm in highlighting her story for a new generation, or in rekindling the embers of someone who burned too bright for this world, but even a movie as evocative and well-mounted as this one can’t help but feel like a shadow of a shadow. It traces the silhouette of “The Strange One” without ever achieving the emotionality it needs to feel her touch first-hand.

Still, there’s real pleasure to be had in watching it try. Much of that stems from the film’s conception of Emily herself, which starts with the author on her deathbed (“How did you write ‘Wuthering Heights?’” her older sister demands to know), and then goes back in time to answer the question of why a super-repressed introvert — stranded on the surface of the moon, grieving the loss of her mother and two eldest siblings, and denied every chance to follow her passions — might be inspired to pen something that reflects the harshness of Victorian life. That may not be the world’s greatest mystery, but O’Connor’s film wonderfully shudders with the shock of Brontë’s time. [...]

The first hour of O’Connor’s leisurely film (well-paced until its endgame sprint to the finish) does a brilliant job of establishing how Emily found solace in her siblings, and also how she felt alienated from them. She’s different, to be sure — as we see in a virtuoso montage of her brief, difficult time at a school away from home — but hardly the sort of Wednesday Addams-esque proto-goth her minister father might want to hide in the attic. The film’s best scene memorably cuts to the heart of the matter (while also hinting at the bleeding heartache of Mackey’s beautiful performance), as a masked guessing game ends with Emily channeling the Brontës’ dead mother so well that we almost believe she’s being possessed. Anne and Charlotte love their sister, but they’re scared for her as well; they share the depth of her pain, but struggle to understand the impetuous ache of its expression.

Branwell has a slightly better grasp on what makes Emily tick, but the simpatico energy between them betrays a painful covetousness once Emily begins to swoon for the handsome new clergyman their father has brought in from the big city. Emily rolls her eyes at William Weightman’s  (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) initial sermons about how “God is in the rain” and whatnot, but such bad writing can only do so much to hide the poetic soul behind it, and it’s only a matter of time before their long, unsubtitled French lessons — masterclasses of body language and batted lashes — lead to unsubtitled French lessons of another kind. [...]

 “Emily” ultimately contrives a domino-like sequence of tragedies from that disconnect, mirroring “Wuthering Heights” in the broadest of strokes without quite bordering on déjà vu. It’s sad and well-arranged, even when it’s stunted by the palpable sense that a truly great work of art is hiding just over the horizon. (David Ehrlich)

The English-Australian actress Frances O’Connor (Mansfield Park) knows this, and that’s why her directorial debut Emily is not a strict biography — it’s a speculative project, an admirer’s serviceable interpretation of an elusive life. Using a series of finely detailed vignettes, O’Connor renders an ethereal portrait of the young writer. Emily builds on earlier Brontë depictions like Curtis Bernhardt’s 1946 Devotion, André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters and Sally Wainwright’s 2016 BBC television film To Walk Invisible. It lifts Emily out of the foggy shadows and into the center, clarifying her identity with a narrative of misanthropy, love and ambition. The film ripples with potential, even if it isn’t always realized: Emily deservedly treats its eponymous protagonist as a misunderstood heroine, but in reaching to assign her a legible identity, the narrative can’t help but tip into cliché.

Sex Education’s Emma Mackey bears the responsibility of embodying Emily, following in the footsteps of Ida Lupino in Devotion, Isabelle Adjani in the The Brontë Sisters and Chloe Pirrie in To Walk Invisible — and what a splendid job she does. With her angular face and penetrating gaze, Mackey commands the screen, confidently shepherding us through Emily’s mercurial moods. Her eyes — darting nervously at one moment, squinting suspiciously at another — tells us what dialogue can’t. [...]

Fans of the Brontës will find Emily’s plot points familiar, but O’Connor frames the film around a question Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) poses to Emily when the latter is close to death. “How did you write it?” the eldest Brontë asks in an urgent, almost disbelieving tone. “How did you write Wuthering Heights?” With that, the film returns to earlier years in the Brontë household, where we begin to understand the degree of Emily’s difference from her siblings. Unlike Charlotte, Anne (Amelia Gething) or brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead in an assured turn), Emily is more of a loner. The other Brontës rationalize her eccentricity as an inability to let go of fanciful stories conjured in childhood, but we are meant to understand Emily’s ritualistic continuation of these tales as a mark of her imagination. [...]

There are gratifying scenes of her at work: Mackey hunched over a desk, staring out of a window into the moors, picking up an ink pen and furiously writing. Her imagination is, for the most part, treated as an otherworldly gift. There are, however, moments when Emily abandons its mission of demystification for the more challenging task of understanding what drove Emily to write. In those instances, the film attributes the poet’s skills to observational prowess and sturdy intuition. The answer to the question of how she managed to write Wuthering Heights becomes simple: by living and paying close attention. (Lovia Gyarkye)

If you’ve ever wondered what inspired Emily Brontë to write Wuthering Heights, you’re not alone – and Frances O’Connor has made a film about it. The actor turns writer-director with the imaginative period drama Emily, premiering at Toronto International Film Festival. Sex Education star Emma Mackey puts in a spirited performance in a feminist, revisionist spin on a much-loved author. [...]

At over two hours, the film feels a little too long, but it gives an involving perspective on Brontë’s interior life, exploring themes such as gender, independence, creativity, mental health and sexuality. It will probably play best to romantic Brontë fans – but as you know, dear reader, there are plenty of those. (Anna Smith)