Emily film review — Brontë biopic is a smart and steamy affair

As should be the case in any great period film, it’s all about the hats. In Emily, you can tell that of the three Brontë sisters seen here, Emily (Emma Mackey) is the one who’ll become the best writer because she’s got the finest bonnet. Just a smidge deeper and wider than the others, and less fussily adorned, Emily’s is more open to the world, ready to catch the sounds of birds and wind, like the millinery equivalent of a radar dish.

The shyest and strangest of the siblings, Emily may not travel as widely as her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) or Anne (Amelia Gething), or even their wastrel brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), but she senses the world around her with a penetrating clarity. Coupled with a profound imagination, that gives her enough material to write one sublime book before dying young: Wuthering Heights.

Sorry, was that a spoiler? If so, then you’re probably not in the target audience anyway for a film that offers a very refined, literary kind of fan service with its sensual, sideways and entirely speculative imagining of a few chapters from Emily Brontë’s short life. Taking all kinds of liberties with the biographical facts, Frances O’Connor’s debut as a writer-director (she’s best known as an actor) nevertheless posits a quite plausible version of Emily.

As embodied by the magnetic Mackey (recently seen in Sex Education and Eiffel), this Emily is not like the other foxes in the litter. But while she is wilder, she’s also smart enough to hold her own in a theological argument, in French no less, with handsome new curate Mr Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). She’s also disciplined enough to squeeze in writing poetry and prose when not cleaning, cooking or doing laundry.

Given our understanding of passion as a destructive as well as creative force in Emily Brontë’s surviving writings, we can buy that she’d end up having a torrid sexual relationship with the eminently seducible Weightman. While it lasts, the bodice-unlacing, crinoline-shedding and irrepressible but illicit desire makes for some of the hottest mid-19th-century shagging scenes since The Piano. It’s even more credible and Brontë-ian that it would end badly, with a very novelistic epistle that doesn’t arrive in time.

However, the film’s imagining of an Emily who experiments with opium, prompting Requiem for a Dream-style extreme close-ups of dilated pupils, and gets a tacky arm tattoo is a serious mis-step, as is a corny deathbed pabulum, straight from the song “Nature Boy”, about the importance of loving and being loved.

But the exceptional craftsmanship of the film washes away most of those sins, especially Abel Korzeniowski’s swooning, keening score, Nanu Segal’s dreamy, candlelit cinematography and Michael O’Connor’s costume design — especially those hats.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from October 14