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Emily review: Brontë gets her sex education in this thrilling feminist biopic-Larushka Ivan-Zadeh-Entertainment – Metro
It’s a sensational example of Brontë fan fiction.
‘How did you write Wuthering Heights?’ demands Charlotte Brontë as her 30-year-old sister Emily (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) lies, coughing, on her deathbed.
The answer to that mystery – or rather, an answer – lies in this feverishly impassioned biopic from actress-turned-director and Emily superfan Frances O’Connor (Mansfield Park).
Conveniently for this film, little is actually known about its subject. Born in 1818, Emily lived a remote, reclusive life in the Yorkshire moors, where her only peers were her surviving siblings: Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Anne (Amelia Gething) and their feckless, alcoholic brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), all of whom became published writers.
Given this limited life experience, how did Emily come to pen such an alarmingly sinister and what several contemporary critics considered ‘depraved’ romance of the forbidden love between a wild orphan called Heathcliff and his foster sister, Cathy?
With scant in the way of biographical fact to fetter her, O’Connor lets her imagination rip. This Emily is the brilliant, sensitive, wild-eyed heroine every Kate Bush-loving teenage girl aspires to be – not least because she looks like Emma Mackey.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen has a ‘Hot Priest’ moment (Picture: Michael Wharley)
Mackey’s Emily is fierce and fiercely intelligent (Picture: Michael Wharley)
Her Emily is ‘the strange one’. Fierce and fiercely intelligent, she shuns the corseted constraints of Victorian society and rollicks moodily around the moors with her naughty brother, Branwell, getting high on opium and getting a tattoo, much to the disapproval of their strait-laced older sister, Charlotte.
‘There’s something ungodly in your writing – I feel it when we’re together,’ declares the hunky new curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) both sisters madly fancy.
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Yes, it’s their very own ‘Hot Priest’. Cue ungodly amount of hay rolling while the score’s strings explode in a frenzy. None of which probably happened. Which may bother you, or it may not.
Unevenly paced, but ravishing to the eye, it’s a movie that could be ripped from the pages of Vogue. The cinematography is sublime. Some bits work (one incredible séance scene suggests O’Connor missed her calling as a horror director), others don’t so much.
But it’s ambitious and almost painfully heartfelt. Less a movie and more a sensational example of Brontë fan fiction.
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