Claire Mabey reviews Emily, the film that attempts to unravel what may have inspired the writer Emily Brontë.

“It’s an ugly book. It’s base!” says Charlotte Brontë to her sister, Emily. “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. 

Emily Brontë died at age 31 and this early end is where the film begins. 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. That their world was somehow tighter, somehow aged. What the film Emily does is remind us just how very young the Brontë sisters were when they composed their classic stories. 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.

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

Emily is played by Emma Mackey, best known as the literature-loving Maeve from Sex Education. She is perfectly suited to reveal Emily’s secrets: pale and interesting with beguiling features. And she carries through into Emily Maeve’s air of punk-alternate rebellion. Her performance of shy-girl genius is restrained, almost tentative, which works against some of the clichés that she and her character are made to weather. For example, there is a scene where Emily and her lost and rampaging brother Branwell stand together and scream into the wind the words “freedom of thought!” until Emily reaches the level of reckless abandon that Branwell is urging her to find. They then sport matching inner-arm tattoos of the same phrase (cue: spate of freedom of thought tattoos for Christmas). Mackey’s sensitivity, as well as the ominous beauty of the moors around her, mean this scene misses, just, falling into the well-worn groove that the Leo and Kate “I’m flying Jack!” scene in Titanic created.

The relationship between Branwell and Emily is central to this version of the Brontë story. History tells us that Branwell was an addict, hooked on alcohol and drugs, worrying at making art on the sidelines. In this film they are allies in the search for experience. Branwell sees in Emily the same potential for chaos that he himself embraces. He introduces her to opium and together they freewheel over the grasses with enormous pupils. Their scenes together mimic the uncanny imagery of Wuthering Heights: they sneak up to a neighbouring manor house and stare through the window at the people inside like the searching ghosts in Emily’s book. When Branwell dies Emily lies with his body and together they look like alternate versions of each other: pale and young and unwell.

But recreational drugs and a worrisome if inspiring brother pale in significance compared to Emily’s sexual awakening. While the film is generally light on comedy, there is a very funny moment towards the end. Emily has finished Wuthering Heights and when Charlotte storms in crying and telling Emily that she hates her, their sister Anne says, “I see you’ve finished the book then.” What we are led to believe that Charlotte loathes/is jealous of is the intensity of the passion that Heathcliff and Cathy feel for each other. It is a famously problematic relationship: violent, intense, turbulent with death and its ghosts. So how then, did an unmarried, daughter of a Parson, who lived in a remote corner of England, come to evoke such a steamy situation? 

The answer, in this film, lies in the loins of the hot new curate in town. In a storyline as old as time, forbidden love breaks Emily’s heart. The new curate is surly and handsome and can match Emily for intelligence. After she is sent back from boarding school (a scene that shows her quivering in a cupboard – suggesting she was too introverted and too homesick for the place) her education is in the hands of this god-fearing man. French lessons very quickly turn to fucking lessons. They meet in an abandoned building on the moors, they do it in front of the fire and all is sexy until God haunts the curate and he calls for it all to stop. It is passionate, and angry and terrible, just like in the book.

Then Charlotte returns from school, looming over Emily’s secret heartbreak like a damp shadow. Some scholars have suggested that Charlotte (who is the primary source of first-hand information about Emily) tried to massage Emily’s reputation posthumously. That her accounts of her sister reframed her nature as shy and reclusive, an entirely more acceptable state than fearsomely rebellious. Charlotte whisks Emily to Brussels to improve her French and in a wild montage accompanied by very gothic music, Emily begins to be haunted by her ex-lover who loiters outside the window. 

Alongside the rugged and romantic landscape of West Yorkshire itself, windows too have a starring role in the film. One of the stand-out passages in Wuthering Heights is when Lockwood rubs the ghostly arm of Catherine on a broken window until they bleed. In this film, windows are the portal between a writer and her capacity to terrify people. In the film, a stand out scene is one in which Emily is forced to join in on a game of role play (the introvert in me winced with sympathy). When Emily puts on the mask she embodies the ghost of their mother, to whom the mask belonged and terrifies all present until the ghost apparently flies out the window. While the scene doesn’t quite work due to a tone of melodrama (too heightened too fast) it opens the door for the window to repeat as a motif from start to finish. 

When Emily sits at her writing desk it’s only when she opens the window that she can begin. The restless world of wind in trees meets her searching mind and there she starts to scrawl. There is an insinuation that there is something … other out there that feeds the creative spirit, as much as the landscape and wider capacity of the world itself. Ultimately though, in a touching scene that suggests that Emily’s fearlessness inspired Charlotte’s later novels, the act of opening the window symbolises the act of giving yourself the freedom to write. And that is the film Emily’s final reflection in the mirror on this elusive life: that Emily Brontë wrote brilliantly wild things because she let herself be wildly brilliant.