Actor turned writer-director Frances O’Connor’s sensuous and loosely biographical drama about the Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë captures the Victorian era with a modern sensibility.
Not modern in that post-Bridgerton sense, where Black and brown characters hold positions of power in a fantastical British society stripped of colonial history. Instead, Emily feels modern in the way it imagines Brontë’s reclusive demeanor and emotional swings with consideration towards trauma, depression and other possible mental health issues that we have the language for today. The characters in the film can’t diagnose these things, but a contemporary audience will spot the signs that O’Connor shrewdly layers into the role played by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey.
