Emily

In literature, Fanny Price is admittedly one of Jane Austen’s rare dullish heroines, but onscreen, in 1999, Frances O’Connor brought twinkle-eyed mischief to the part in Patricia Rozema’s underrated, defiantly feminist and progressive interpretation of Mansfield Park. O’Connor has mischief in mind again in her writing-and-directing feature debut, a biopic, of sorts, of Emily Brontë, in which the filmmaker plays fast and loose with the facts and invents whole-cloth a frankly preposterous sexual affair for the unmarried and intensely withdrawn author.

That mischief, the sense of play, is largely confined to behind the camera; the film itself is moody, gloomy, and – in line with the author’s one and only published novel, Wuthering Heights – suitably obsessed with the elements. Here, the sound of wind battering the moorland sounds like water beating against rocks sounds like blood rushing to the ears. The meticulous sound design can be overwhelming, in the best sense; it is building the case for how sensitive – how open to sensation – Emily is, and how that alertness informs her work.

The work comes later. After a quick deathbed intro (remember, this Brontë died at only 30, and none of the seven Brontë children made it to 40), we meet Emily in her haler days, amusing herself with a fantastical tale, something her older sister Charlotte (Dowling) will scold her for – the implication being that Emily should really grow up already. But, as the film makes clear, Emily does not thrive in society. (Charlotte – somewhat the villain of the piece – tartly informs Emily she’s known in the village as “the strange one.”) Driven to panic in social situations outside the home and weirdly hostile even in the company of close family, Emily spends most of her days romping outdoors with her fun-loving but dissolute brother Branwell (Whitehead) and learning French from her father’s handsome young curate (Jackson-Cohen).

Ah. The curate. We’re about to go off a cliff here, so before we do: Front and center in practically every frame, Emma Mackey (Netflix’s Sex Education, Death on the Nile) is utterly magnetic. Her resting face has the ghost of a snarl – there is something almost feral about her – and she carries the film confidently along its exasperating trajectory.

Did unmarried women in 1848 fuck? Sure! Absolutely! But there’s no evidence this one did. It’s one of several flights of fancy O’Connor indulges in. The film also eliminates mention of the first book by Charlotte, Emily, and younger sister Anne, a jointly written poetry collection published under their noms de plume as the Bell brothers; it presents the publication of Wuthering Heights as under Emily’s own name, not “Ellis Bell” (that wouldn’t happen until several years after her death); and it strongly implies Charlotte didn’t get cooking on Jane Eyre until Emily died (it was a published over a year before her death). If I better understood what O’Connor hoped to achieve with these fabrications, maybe I’d rear up less. But not perceiving anything deeper than “what if Wuthering Heights was actually inspired by a dude?” the not-unengrossing Emily made me as peevish as Tarantino’s historical rewrite in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood did. By trying to give these women happy endings, or proposing fake reasons for how they came to produce indelible works, these alternative histories only achieve the opposite. They rob them of the truth of their lives.