Despite writing diaries, poems and Wuthering Heights — one of the great works of English literature — little or nothing is known about Emily Brontë, the reclusive second youngest of the Brontë sisters. It is a mystery that has allowed actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor to exercise her imagination out on the moors that defined Heathcliff and Catherine’s tempestuous relationship.
O’Connor, who came to prominence in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park and Steven Spielberg’s AI, knows something of costume drama and world-building, and Wuthering Heights proves a pleasing sandbox.
“How did you write Wuthering Heights?” the overbearing Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) asks Emily (Emma Mackey), as the latter lies dying from tuberculosis, four months after her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) succumbed to the same condition. The film answers in a series of flashbacks that coalesce into an origins story for the novel.
In a series of lovingly fashioned vignettes, we learn that Emily is initially close to Anne (Amelia Gething) until the latter grows out of the imaginary world of Angria. The Wuthering Heights author enjoys roving around the moors and occasionally dropping opium with her dilettante brother. She remains, however, a solitary oddball.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
A sequence in which she claims to speak for her dead mother through a mask — an artefact the Brontë sisters actually possessed — is a thrilling study in hysteria.
Her life is punctuated by an unsuccessful spell at boarding school, an equally unsuccessful trip to Belgium, and an unexpected nascent romance with William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a young curate. It’s complicated; he is both intrigued and repelled by her writing.
Cinematographer Nanu Segal makes terrific use of the grey skies and Yorkshire landscape. Michael O’Connor’s costumes are cleverly character-coded; Emily’s dresses are as rugged as Charlotte’s are fussy. The ensemble, including Adrian Dunbar as the Brontë patriarch, is a credit to casting director, Fiona Weir. Mackey, in particular, is a powerhouse. The young star is matched well with O’Connor’s carefully calibrated, appealingly earnest script, which approximates a modern sensibility without striking a false note or straying from Emily’s contemporaneous moors.
