This is Emily Bronte of the social media generation who, on the outside, is seen as an ‘outsider’ in the Yorkshire village of Haworth. Played with dazzling confidence by Emma Mackie of Sex Education, Emily would have been a huge hit on TikTok, with her coquettish smiles, disdain for pedestrians, and iron-clad views.
The writer and director acknowledges that her film doesn’t match well-known facts, but put your nagging doubts to one side and two hours of cinematic intensity will swallow you up.
It never subsides, with the young woman’s thirst for weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in charge of her father leading to an emotional shootout that spawns her only novel, a work full of sexual tension and psychological torture, you can believe something like this. It must have happened to inspire her. If not, then what?
The relationship with Brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) is painted particularly well, always a disappointment to his clergy father (Line Of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar).
Bran takes solace in syrup and opium, tempting Emily along the way. Their fallout, when Em gets rid of his worthless fantasy attempts, can only end in disaster.
The movie begins at the end, with Emily on her deathbed at the age of 30, and her sister Charlotte telling her that her book is “ugly and ugly, full of selfish people who only care about themselves.”
Our heroine replied: “Good!”
What really happened on the swamps a few hundred years ago we will never know.
But Bronte’s influence transcends the ages, in every psychosexual drama and so on up to the Twilight vampire movies and to Bronte Balti in downtown Haworth.
O’Connor shows us, in a controversial and clever way, how this can happen.
- Emily, Siert 15, is in cinemas now
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