'Emily' Works as a Brontë Biopic, but Its Construction is Flawed

The artist biopic, specifically the ones about writers, is one of the stalest forms of cinema. Its narrative tension usually relies on contemporaries of the famous author insisting their book will never fly, paying off with the inevitable, flimsily satisfying reveal that, yes, they did publish the book that would go on to wow generations henceforth, but not without the author suffering a great deal. Much can be unpacked by how raw, human stories rich with empathy and pain can be utterly flattened and hollowed out by uninspired story design, but thankfully actor Frances O’Connor’s directing debut Emily takes inspiration from a different, fresher subsect of biopic cinema.

O’Connor’s film is about the famed middle-child Brontë, who died before turning 30 but whose sole novel Wuthering Heights forged a path for her sisters and female writers everywhere to pen confronting, bracing literature, and feels more influenced by the intensely stylized, artistically-liberated films about real people that seek to capture intensity of feeling rather than cold, hard facts.

Spencer comes to mind watching Emily, as does this year’s Corsage, but Emily feels most influenced by the films of female directors who unpacked the psychology and legacy of female writers, or the women in their immediate circle; Josephine Decker’s Shirley, Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley, even Jane Campion’s Bright Star. In terms of its effectiveness, Emily lands somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: it works, but its construction is flawed.