Emily

Frances O'Connor spent twenty-five years as an actor — Mansfield Park, A.I., The Missing — before writing and directing her first feature, which premiered in the Platform strand at Toronto in 2022. It is an invented life rather than a biography: almost nothing is documented about Emily Brontë's twenty-nine years, and O'Connor has filled the gap deliberately rather than apologetically.

Emma Mackey plays her as the family's problem — clever, ungovernable, humiliated at a dinner table, more at ease on the moor than in the parsonage. Fionn Whitehead is Branwell, the brother whose encouragement and self-destruction are equally formative. Oliver Jackson-Cohen is the curate William Weightman, sent to teach her French, who becomes the film's central speculation. Nanu Segal shot it in low natural light and handheld close-up, and the film's most discussed sequence, a parlour game with a mask, is entirely O'Connor's invention.

Purists objected to the liberties. The more interesting reading is that the film is doing what Wuthering Heights does — refusing to be well-behaved about desire — and that a decorous costume drama about the woman who wrote it would have been the real betrayal. Mackey's performance carries genuine force, and it makes the case that the novel came from somewhere rather than arriving out of the weather.