A Sensual Portrait of a Brilliant Young Woman Far Ahead of Her Time

Frances O’Connor’s Emily, her directorial debut, takes a familiar literary biography and garnishes it with the right kind of creative liberties — the vibrant, suggestive kind. It’s the story of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, younger sister to Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre and Villette. Emily isn’t a straight biopic but, at its best, a suggestive and enjoyable exploration of a young, imaginative mind and its troubles — Emily is, from the start of the movie, a woman brushing up against the limits of decorum, increasingly so as the myth-building, wandering mind that sustained her and her three siblings in childhood persists, for Emily, into adulthood, when her siblings seem for the most part to be moving on to finer things, like love and their hunger for occupation. 

Emma Mackey (of Sex Education fame) plays Emily, and from merely the way she presents herself relative to her siblings — staring at her feet around others, with her long brown hair hanging down into her face in a gesture that comes off as both extraordinarily shy and slightly mischievous — she sets herself apart. This is one of those stories about a woman genius whose will and imagination are mitigated and contained by her era. She is fitful and idiosyncratic, to be sure, uncontrollable in her breaking of rules that feel arbitrary, not because she intends to be defiant, but because she is who she is. The movie begins with Emily in the throes of death (from tuberculosis) and leaps backward to trace the secrets and desires that are at risk of dying with her.