And she carries through into Emily Maeve’s air of punk-alternate rebellion. She is perfectly suited to reveal Emily’s secrets: pale and interesting with beguiling features. There is a lot of running over the moors, especially in the rain: mirroring the crazed back and forth of her characters Cathy and Heathcliff, this fictionalised Emily is equally enamoured with being a girl, standing upon a moor, asking it to pour terrible weather all over her and respond to the unpredictable energy roiling within.Įmily is played by Emma Mackey, best known as the literature-loving Maeve from Sex Education. An all female choir shrieks like an unsettling howl of wind as young Emily runs over the moors, her dark hair loose (in marked contrast with the prim, blonde do of her sister and competitor, Charlotte).

From the first track of Abel Korzeniowski’s score, Emily Brontë is nestled firmly in an atmosphere of the witchy otherworldly. Strangeness is a compelling feature of Emily’s life, and of her novel, and is the foundation upon which the film builds her character.

It is this youth, and the universally recognised passions and rages that come with it, that fuels the movie and lifts it when it does, at times, teeter towards a hurried, episodic structure that tries to fit all of the strangenesses in. What the film Emily does is remind us just how very young the Brontë sisters were when they composed their classic stories. That their world was somehow tighter, somehow aged. It is sometimes tempting to think of historic literary figures, with their portraits dark and solemn, of being somehow older than what they really were. “How did you write it? There’s something you’re not telling me?” The question of where writers get their ideas is at the heart of Emily, a new movie that attempts to tease out the life and inspirations of the mysterious author and how she came to be the creator of the gloriously batshit gothic classic, Wuthering Heights.Įmily Brontë died at age 31 and this early end is where the film begins. It’s base!” says Charlotte Brontë to her sister, Emily. Claire Mabey reviews Emily, the film that attempts to unravel what may have inspired the writer Emily Brontë.

Charlotte bronte wuthering heights