Film review: Sex Education's Emma Mackey is aloof, manic and vibrant in Emily 

Emma Mackey is in superb form in Emily 

★★★★☆

What kind of mind conceived the twisted genius of Wuthering Heights? 

Opening with its heroine on her deathbed, Emily (15A) is told almost entirely in flashback as writer-director Frances O’Connor takes the few verifiable details of the life of Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey) and weaves them into a vivid portrait of the artist as a young lady. 

Shy and solitary, a ‘scruff’ who is more at home on the Yorkshire Moors than she is in the company of anyone outside her immediate family of Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Anne (Amelia Gething), Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) and her father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), Emily is considered ‘the strange one’ by the Haworth villagers. 

However, the arrival of a handsome new curate, Mr Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), proves a catalyst for Emily’s emotional, sexual and creative awakening, which – fuelled by an occasional tincture from Branwell’s stash of opium – sets Emily’s imagination aflame. 

Eschewing historical rigor for creative reimagining (an early glimpse of Emily’s copy of Wuthering Heights with ‘Emily Brontë’ rather than her pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’ on the spine confirms that Frances O’Connor won’t be constrained by factual details), Emily is as wildly passionate an affair as the celebrated novel, in which the tempestuous author is herself the inspiration for Cathy and Heathcliff. 

Emma Mackey is in superb form here, by turns aloof, manic and vibrant as she embodies the irrepressible Romanticism that inspired Wuthering Heights, and she gets very strong support from Alexandra Dowling as the self-consciously respectable Charlotte, and Fionn Whitehead as the debauched libertine Branwell. 

Wuthering Heights fans might be disappointed that the fabled Yorkshire Moors are a little on the tame side, but for the most part Emily is a torrid and earthily poetic portrait of one of English literature’s true mavericks. 

(cinema release)