EMILY
★★ OUT 14 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 130 MINS
DIRECTOR Frances O’Connor
CAST Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
Not much is known about Emily Brontë. For her feature directorial debut, Frances O’Connor fabricates a fanciful, invented life for her that never dares to push the limits of acceptability. But this should be Brontë country — Yorkshire, wind, rain, earth and dirt, not clean white sheets and the missionary position. Emily further frustrates by suggesting a woman cannot create art that isn’t directly inspired by real, lived experience — the film’s imagined narrative mirrors that of her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, with Emily (Emma Mackey) in place of Cathy and a preacher (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as her Heathcliff. A bold experiment, perhaps, but it leaves us with a film that does not allow Brontë the respect to create her own fiction.