Emily Brontë (Emma Mackay), before writing one of the most enduring English-language novels, grew up in a fraught home after the passing of her mother.  Under the weight of expectations from her father, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), a strained relationship with her sister, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), a forbidden romance with the new preacher William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), and her only true friend – and brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) – being sent away, life was nothing short of exhausting for the young woman.   

Frances O’Connor writes and directs Emily for Bleecker Street, a 130-minute loose account of Brontë’s life which inspired her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights before her untimely death the following year.  The film feels respectful and was heavily researched using ancillary accounts written by other members and friends of the family to fill in some of the more personal details that are not found in strictly historical records.  Despite these efforts to shine a light on Brontë’s story, Emily falls into many of the same pitfalls that many of the Wuthering Heights adaptations and their ilk do; becoming a stately Victorian-era romantic drama with little to offer other than the same collage of visuals containing ornate wallpaper, dimly lit rooms, women in frilly gowns, and the men wearing gigot sleeved shirts. 

While she may not be a household name quite yet, Mackay – who is in an as-of-yet unnamed but top-billed position in Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming Barbie (2023) – fills the role of Emily in a carefully nuanced performance that while capitalizing on the gothic intrigue, gives the writer moments of power which bring electricity to the screen. It would be easy to play this role too far in any direction be it the social anxiety or the depression which given the time would have led to fits of “insanity,” but Mackay never allows Emily’s very real concerns and feelings to be sensationalized, nor exploited. She plays this young woman, someone who has known almost nothing but heartache and loss, with a fierce courage to keep moving forward and finding a reprieve from her daily life through her creativity. 

What holds Emily back from breaking free of the weight of a period costume drama is not the fault of the cast who are all quite good – in addition to Mackay, the disruptive energy which Whitehead brings is very enjoyable as is the danger injected by Jackson-Cohen, making for an intriguing triptych – but it falls at the feet of O’Connor’s insistent reliance on such a blue-washed color palate. It becomes painfully obvious that the film was shot day-for-night, and while it surely would have been easier on the cast and crew as so much of the script takes place past twilight, it takes on a downright ugly at times appearance as we lose out on so many of the smaller details in costumes and set from the blue wash. Nanu Segal handles the cinematography, and while her camera is mostly stationary throughout the heavily dialogued film, she always seeks to find creative setups in which to frame the characters often opting to capture the backs of the characters or obscure their faces in some way so that there are always some emotional secrets for the otherwise omnipresent audience to discover.    

Where Segal excels the most in the film, and consequently when Emily is at its best, is when O’Conner gets a little weird. The first instance of this comes early on in the film when the children gather with Weightman after their father has retired from the evening, and perform a bit of a séance using an old mask once belonging to their mother. The hatches fly open, the wind extinguishes the lamps, and the girls, overcome with grief and the memory of their mother, wail through the window for her to return. It is a downright spooky scene, and it teases audiences with the promise of something unique, and while this motif of the mask will return throughout the film, it is not present nearly enough to carry the weight of the extended runtime. The film is not without mystery, though. As a romance buds between Emily and Weightman, notes cross paths and are lost track of, and Emily becomes more and more enraged and empowered as she stands up for herself. In this sense, there is quite a bit of plot mechanic to work through and absorb, however, the script feels overwritten and therefore drags considerably in this middle act where no one is really working towards anything, but rather they are just bumping into each other, ruffling feathers, and waiting for an explosion. When it does arrive, it is quite muted, unfortunately, and given the historical fact of her early death from tuberculosis, there is little that O’Connor can do to extend the narrative by much to help tie together the pinning of the middle act. Emily’s life was cut untimely short, and tragic as it is in real life, superficially it makes the film also feel as if the story was cut off just as it was beginning. 

Emily is still a film with many engaging moments and creative sparks that it cannot be totally written off by the actor-turned-director. It is a very tailored first feature and while the creative choices made may be disagreeable, it still presents a clear and unified vision. With Abel Korzeniowski’s period-strings score the haunting bow on top of the package, Emily cannot be denied its place as a very strong technical work coupled with an ensemble cast that works incredibly well together. It is just missing that punch up to make it into something great, maybe due to the lack of hard facts surrounding its subject and the prevailing desire to stay respectful to the legacy and not stray too far from what little is known, but great cinema needs within it a spark and O’Connor plays it a little too safe for too long in Emily.