That most tempestuous English literature classic, Wuthering Heights, has been adapted countless times since it was first published, in 1847.
Emily Brontë's saga of a love so intense, so destructive as to burn all in its wake has enamoured scores of playwrights, composers, and filmmakers, and (most importantly) Kate Bush.
For her Heights-inspired directorial debut, Frances O'Connor takes a road much less travelled, opting to tell the story not of Cathy and Heathcliff but of their brilliant creator.
The Perth-raised actor-turned-filmmaker is no stranger to crafting 19th-century heroines, having first turned heads internationally with her portrayal of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1999), Patricia Rozema's revisionist take on Jane Austen.
O'Connor brought a spunky, strong-willed edge to her character not present in the literary original — qualities inspired by her creator's own disposition — but she has always thought of herself more of a Brontë gal, preferring the work of Emily (as well as sisters Charlotte and Anne), so "wild and passionate", to Austen's decorous veneer.
As brought to life by Sex Education's Emma Mackey, Emily Brontë has a brooding, unruly streak that would likely somewhat startle Austen's Fanny, as it apparently does the local village folk — who, the maternal Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) reveals in a moment of frustration, refer to Emily as "the strange one".
She seems almost a retrofitted antecedent of prickly misfit girls like Thora Birch's Enid from slacker gem Ghost World (2001), or current Netflix darling Wednesday Addams. (There are no TikTok-worthy dance breaks in Emily, but it was surely strategic to cast Amelia Gething, one of the platform's zoomer celebs, as Anne.)
Such cool-weird teens — poring over a battered copy of Wuthering Heights at lunch, perhaps, or warbling along with the 18-year-old Bush in their bedroom — are no doubt the intended audience for O'Connor's Emily, which is as much, if not more, a coming-of-age tale as it is a hypothetical take on the novel's origins.
That there have been relatively few attempts to dramatise the life of Brontë no doubt has much to do with an ostensible dearth of, well, drama – though it was not short on tragedy, marred early on by the deaths of her mother and two elder sisters when she, Charlotte, and Anne were still children, and later by that of their troubled brother Branwell (played here by Dunkirk lead Fionn Whitehead).
In all the author's 30 years — her own life cut short by tuberculosis in 1848, not long after Wuthering Heights' publication — she strayed very rarely from the Brontë family homestead in rural Yorkshire. "I am an odd fish," rues Mackey's Emily, bitterly. "If you take me away from here I dry up and fade away."
Her pronounced tendency for reclusion and privacy ensured that future biographers would have plenty of blanks to fill in.
That actually makes her an exciting candidate for biopic treatment, in this writer's opinion: The thinness of the middle Brontë sister's biography is something of a gift to the courageous filmmaker; an invitation to speculate and invent instead of merely recreate.
And Emily reveals itself to be unconcerned with total factual accuracy in the opening scene, as its heroine lies dying with her only novel beside her in three chunky tomes. They are embossed with her name – and yet, Wuthering Heights was originally circulated under the pen name Ellis Bell (like those of her sisters, carefully selected to be gender-neutral), her identity revealed only in a posthumous edition.
O'Connor's boldest gambit, however, is the romance she fabulates for her main character — with the handsomely forelocked curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, The Invisible Man), newly arrived in Haworth and set to sermonise under the auspices of the Brontë patriarch. Though Emily makes a show of being sceptical of his charms, she struggles to stifle a smile alongside her giggling sisters when reading the valentine's greetings he sends to each of them.
Theirs is a clandestine affair, born under cover of rain-lashed darkness, and depicted in a manner that is quite a bit steamier than even the least ankle-shy Victorian could have mustered.
It is by these means that O'Connor infuses her film with the kind of intrigue that is missing from the remaining traces of her subject's life.
If Emily's coupling with the young curate is not entirely convincing as star-crossed, that is — I think — by design: Weightman, himself a figure drawn from real life, though his affections are thought to have been for Anne, here becomes a model for Wuthering Heights' Edgar Linton, the genteel, temperate man Cathy chooses to marry, much to Heathcliff's horror.
Brother Branwell in turn provides a partial template for the wild and incurably wilful Heathcliff. It is with Branwell that Emily roves the moors and dares, on occasion, to experiment with intoxicants; it is he who enjoins her to ignore convention in favour of pursuing her heart's desires. "Freedom in thought!" the siblings bellow together into the wind, blissfully unaware of the concept of cringe.
Freedom in thought was something that the Brontë siblings always had a great deal of. As children, they invented epic narratives set in fictional kingdoms, acting them out with the assistance of toy soldiers and composing them in miniature books. Emily in particular would continue to nourish fantasies of Gondal, the island she created with Anne, throughout her life.
"How did you write Wuthering Heights?" Charlotte asks Emily, waxen-faced on her deathbed, in the film's opening scene. "There is something more – something you're hiding from me."
Brontë did in fact hide her poetry from her siblings; the idea that she could have hidden an entire relationship is a tantalising, and narratively useful, one.
And yet, it feels somehow reductive to frame the bond between Cathy and Heathcliff — one that has always struck me as supernatural more than sexual; a thirst for possession of the other that is, unlike lust, impossible to slake — as deriving from life experience.
"I took my pen and put it to paper," Emily coldly responds to Charlotte. I find this answer — literal-minded but implicitly affirming the powers of her own imagination — to be the most fascinating one.
Emily is in cinemas now.
