Directed By Frances O’ Connor

Starring – Emma Mackey, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Fionn Whitehead

The Plot – Re-imagines Emily Brontë’s own Gothic story that inspired her seminal novel, ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Haunted by the death of her mother, Emily (Mackey) struggles within the confines of her family life and yearns for artistic and personal freedom, and so begins a journey to channel her creative potential into one of the greatest novels of all time.

Rated R for some sexuality involving nudity, and drug use

EMILY | Official Trailer | Bleecker Street – YouTube

POSITIVES

Whisking us away to a time of prominence and potential in the life of literary legend Emily Bronte, first time writer and director Frances O’ Connor channels an unorthodox approach in her biopic that doesn’t exactly rely on truths to convey the magnitude of her story. Instead, fabrication is the appropriate route for dramatic emphasis to Emily’s little known factual story, with background conflicts of internal insecurities, love triangles, and of course a disapproving family serving as the fuel to her creative fire that drives her to escape the toxic confines of the story’s consistent setting. O’Connor uses these ingredients to indulge upon a thickly tense and at times haunting enveloping for the duration of the film, and because of such evolves towards a gripping second half of the narrative that not only kept my attention maintained through the unforeseen circumstances that tragically come to define Emily’s life, but also helps to conjure a three-ring circus of a soap opera without any of the cheesy dialogue or over the top performances from its ensemble characters. For the occasion, Mackey rises triumphantly on carrying this film on her broadly resilient shoulders, seamlessly pulling off the brooding mysteriousness of Emily, but also the intellectual intuitions of her periodically mischievious demeanor that she uses to instill an undeterred connection that she shares with us the audience. It doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, but because of Mackey’s resounding depth and ferocity behind a single look, we’re given the most time to study and read her abstractions, solidifying for her a breakthrough performance with the perfect read for her limitless talents. There’s also a unique dynamic between tone versus technical components that crafts an edginess to Emily’s narrative, and in turn imbedding some conductive grit to the visuals that antithesizes this gothically grandeur story. In particular, the editing and compositions take on a sinister kind of tone that we’ve seen before in horror films, granting Emily a palpable kind of edginess to her psychology that feels like it could easily go towards violent and malicious at any moment, in turn forcing us the audience to hang on to every engagement to see where this creatively unpredictable narrative will take us. It doesn’t always work on every aspect of production, as I will detail later on, but it conjures something rarely invigorating for the sake of originality with regards to Victorian biopics, immediately inviting me in on the merits of atmosphere alone before it ever has a chance to tell intrigue me narratively.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, a few key mistakes of creativity hinder “Emily’s” accessibility, leading to an imbalance of entertainment value from an inferior first half that will inevitably test audiences more than they would prefer. At 125 minutes, the film isn’t necessarily too long, as a story pertaining to Emily Bronte’s life is an intriguing angle, especially since we know so little factually about her, but it’s just a poor usage of its minutes, with pocketed moments of flatly produced pacing that stacked like a chore to my initial engagement. To be fair, it does improve remarkably once you get to the film’s halfway point, but considering it takes an hour for the sewn seeds of dramatic intensity to grow naturally for the benefit of the script’s evolution, more refinement on the first act could’ve paced our expectations for what’s to come, in turn giving us the kind of smoothing out for entertainment value that the script so desparately needs. A lot of this blame can fall on the editing, which often indulges in these abrupt cuts to black frequently throughout these very powerfully surreal sequences, eviscerating momentum in ways that kept me from anticipating the following scene. In addition to the script, the film’s musical score from Abel Korzeniowski is emotionally confusing, taking us on a dark and foreboding kind of tone that audibly prepares us for impending doom. It’s certainly easy to see what Abel was going for, especially considering my aforementioned praise of the visuals opposing this posh and elegant setting, but it often works against itself for this measurement, building artificial emotions that not only contradict the story at large, but also meander in ways that eviscerate subtlety from the integrity of the sequence.

OVERALL
“Emily” represents a mostly succesful undertaking from first time writer and director Frances O’ Connor, who visually and atmospherically paints the cryptic author with a melancholy of gothic grandeur that audiences can feel from the first of many hypnotic horror shot compositions. Though the film doesn’t always make the most of its minutes, with pocketed moments of dull pacing and questionable editing techniques, the dramatic flare of the film’s climax is a saving grace, remedying “Emily” as a real page turner that avoids all biopic cliches as a result of its irreverent approach.

My Grade: 7/10 or B-