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"If I could I would work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results." — Emily Brontë

Her wish came to pass. Wuthering Heights  is a book for the ages, and her poetry (unlike her sisters'), still lifts off the page with bleak despairing imagery and a ferocious independence of tone. Her most famous poems— No Coward Soul is Mine  (which Emily Dickinson apparently asked to have read at her funeral) and Remembrance —are regularly anthologized. I encountered Often Rebuked  in high school, and the following lines helped me get through those sometimes rocky years. 

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.

Words to live by, and Emily lived by them in her tragically short life. But what do we know about her, really? Charlotte described her as “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.” Emily rarely left home (and when she did leave home, it usually ended badly). This means we don't have a voluminous correspondence from Emily in the way we have from Charlotte, who went away to school and work, writing multiple letters a day. Much of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte, the sole surviving sibling after the catastrophic one-year period (1848-1849), where sisters Anne and Emily and brother Branwell all died. Given the spotty record, speculation about what might have been going on fills the void. Frances O'Connor 's "Emily" engages in some really wild speculations, some of which I've heard, others which are new to me, but it's all in an attempt to get close to the most mysterious Brontë, not just as a person but as an artist. 

In this, O'Connor has a perfect partner in Emma Mackey , who plays Emily with sensitivity and freedom. She's not held back by an imposed "conception" of this woman. She's let loose. Her Emily is joyous, sulky, troubled, paralyzed with anxiety, rebellious, and passionate. There's reason to believe all of this is true. The local villagers referred to Emily as "the strange one," and without overplaying it, Mackey suggests why. She can't make eye contact with people. She shrinks from interactions with non-family members. When Michael Weightman ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen ), Mr. Brontë's new assistant curate, enters the family circle, he disturbs the waters. His sermons are the opposite of Mr. Brontë's fire-and-brimstone declarations. Weightman speaks of a gentle, almost thoughtful God. The Brontë sisters listen enraptured, and they also can't fail to notice he's easy on the eyes. Emily responds to him combatively, at first, poking holes in his arguments, refusing to concede ground. Naturally, he's drawn to her the most. 

There are a number of extraordinary sequences, speculative in nature, but which make so much sense thematically and emotionally. "Emily" goes deep. (Surface events are minimal, anyway. A similar issue arises with Emily Dickinson, whose life was not crowded with outer events. But look to "the results." It's possible to never leave home and live a dramatic inner life. This is what Frances O'Connor explores wonderfully well.) There's a scene where Emily, goofing around with her siblings and Weightman, puts on a ceramic mask. At first, it's part of a game until Emily transforms, the mask providing her the anonymity necessary to express the grief beneath the surface, all as a storm rises outside. The scene is an incredible work of imagination, anchored in what we already know and what we can guess at, considering Wuthering Heights . It evokes—without underlining the connection—the book's terrifying opening scene, with the ghost rattling at the window frame, imploring to be allowed inside out of the storm. 

The relationships are all in flux. Sister Charlotte ( Alexandra Dowling ) looks at wild Emily with concern. Sister Anne ( Amelia Gething ) is an ally at first but eventually moves out of reach. This leaves Branwell ( Fionn Whitehead ). One can only imagine what it must have been like to be the only brother to these three majestic Weird Sisters. He had an artistic sensibility but lacked drive and discipline. He led a dissipated scandalous life. The relationship between Emily and Branwell is the heart of the film—the two rebels supporting each other, for better or worse, shared by the mirroring relationship between Emily and Weightman. 

What "Emily" does so well is establish a mood. The mood is flexible enough to contain multitudes. Nanu Segal's cinematography is sparked with energy and drive. There are times when the camera hurtles through the rooms or across the fields, chasing after Emily, careening around corners, almost like it's going to crash into a wall. The romantic scenes between Emily and Weightman shiver with a passion so forbidden—and so foreign to Emily—you worry for her. You know the end. "Emily" takes place before the sisters all started getting published. But work is growing in them. 

The question has dogged critics for two centuries now: How on earth could a woman who grew up in virtual isolation come up with a story as feral as Wuthering Heights ? Jane Eyre has its madness (Mr. Rochester dressing in drag! The lunatic woman trapped in the attic! Mr. Rochester calling to Jane across the space-time continuum!), but Wuthering Heights makes Jane Eyre look tame. Wuthering Heights takes place in a world of godless chaos. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote of the book in 1854, "The action is laid in Hell—only it seems places and people have English names there." There's nothing soft  in Wuthering Heights . How could someone with no life experience think up such a story? 

It's understandable to want historical accuracy in a biopic. Critiques of whitewashing are often on point. But there are deeper concerns, ones which so many biopics dodge. Why does this person matter? Why has their art lasted? Who were they as an artist? There have been numerous biopics that are not Wikipedia pages come to life but extended meditations on the artist's work, its impact, and the persona of the artist as an artist (Stanley Kwan's "Center Stage," Bill Pohlad's " Love & Mercy ," Madeleine Olnek's " Wild Nights with Emily ," Todd Haynes' " I'm Not There ," to name just a recent few). There have been charges of historical inaccuracy thrown at "Emily." (The ending of the recent " Corsage " is a fascinating example of total lack of historical accuracy. It didn't happen that way at all. But what does it provide us imaginatively, speculatively, about the Empress?) It's long been thought that Anne was the one in love with Weightman, that something happened between them. People point to passages in her novel that seem to correspond. That's fine. It's possible. But it's still just speculation. What if it were Emily? 

We'll never know why Branwell painted himself out of the portrait he did of his three sisters, creating the strange effect of a golden pillar of Branwell-shaped flame between Emily and Charlotte. We don't know if he even did paint himself out. Maybe he didn't paint himself out at all, maybe he painted his sisters over another work. Maybe we're way off about all of it. We weren't there. But guessing is how we get closer to what matters: Who was Emily? How did she make sense of life? How did this go into her work? We know Emily by her results. The rest is silence. And imaginative leaps like Frances O'Connor's "Emily."

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Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Emily (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use.

130 minutes

Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë

Fionn Whitehead as Branwell Brontë

Oliver Jackson-Cohen as William Weightman

Alexandra Dowling as Charlotte Brontë

Gemma Jones as Aunt Branwell

Adrian Dunbar as Patrick Brontë

Amelia Gething as Anne Brontë

• Frances O'Connor

Cinematographer

• Abel Korzeniowski

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‘Emily’ Review: A Brontë Sister’s Savage, Hardy and Free Life

Blending fact with generous, liberating fiction, the director Frances O’Connor brings the author of “Wuthering Heights” to pleasurable life.

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By Manohla Dargis

Recluse, genius, rebel, muse — a multitude of Emily Brontës crowd the cultural imagination. She was kind, cruel, reserved and wild. Her eyes were gray, though sometimes blue, if perhaps gray-blue or hazel. Her sister Charlotte wrote that Emily, who knew French and German, played Beethoven on the piano, studied in Brussels and, well, wrote “Wuthering Heights,” was a “homebred country girl” with “no worldly wisdom.” Yet Charlotte also wrote that Emily had “a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero.”

That there is no consensus Emily Brontë — who left behind one novel, some 200 poems , several essays and much mystery when she died at 30 in 1848 — has proved liberating for the writer-director Frances O’Connor. Her “Emily” is a confident directorial debut and an enjoyably irreverent take on Brontë, one that builds on the scant historical record to construct an imaginary, at times wishful portrait of the artist. Despite its attention to the past, the movie isn’t an exercise in futile authenticity or a dreary compendium of biopic banalities. It is instead an expression of O’Connor’s love for — and desire to understand — her elusive subject.

In detail and sweep, “Emily” nevertheless shares many of the handsome, cozily inviting essentials of a standard biographical work-up. It was shot in Yorkshire, the northern English county where Brontë lived most of her life, and features the frocks, pretty bonnets, candlelit rooms and horse-drawn carriages of the era. There’s a somber stone home where Emily — a mercurial, mesmerizing Emma Mackey — and her tightknit family work and dream. And naturally there are the moors that, with their peaks, valleys and undulating grasses changing colors with the moody sky, make a suitably dramatic backdrop for transcendental reveries.

After a brief preface, the story proper opens with Emily on the moors, lying on the ground and idly stroking the grass as she talks to herself. She’s narrating a romantic dialogue between a “Captain Sneaky” and an unnamed woman — an apparent reference to the elaborate adventure tales that the Brontë children invented — the faint sounds of military music and soldiers blending in with birdsong and the lightly stirring wind. It’s a smart, seductive introduction that nicely sets the tone and mood, establishing Emily’s creativity and her contented solitude. She’s clearly at home in nature and with herself, but she’s also presently on the move, racing across the moors and into O’Connor’s adventure.

Working briskly, O’Connor sketches in Emily’s world with pictorial beauty, economic scenes, naturalistic conversations, meaningful silences and ricocheting gazes. “Is it nice having friends outside the family?” Emily is soon asking of Charlotte (a tart Alexandra Dowling), who has briefly returned from the boarding school where Emily will study, too, disastrously in her case. Charlotte laughs, replying “of course,” but she also scolds Emily for her fantasies and tries to rein her in, creating a tense dynamic that trembles through the movie. Like Emily, Charlotte has her own stories, including, in time, “Jane Eyre,” but for the most part the role she plays in this story, fairly or not, is that of the obedient, pinched scold.

O’Connor, an actress who’s played her share of period heroines, starred in the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “ Mansfield Park ,” a film that — like this one — takes a frisky approach to its source material. O’Connor’s most radical move here is to create a swoony romance for Emily, which begins the moment she lays eyes on William Weightman (a very fine Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a gravely serious young curate with an amusingly flirty forelock. (His eyes say no; his unruly hair says otherwise.) Brought in to help the Brontë paterfamilias, a reverend, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), William immediately stirs up the congregation, eliciting fluttering coos and stares. He’s also enlisted to help Emily with her French. The lessons heat up quickly.

The affair is pleasurably steamy, and however heretical O’Connor’s invention, it’s nice to see Emily Brontë having a bodice-ripping good time, especially given how steeped in sorrow her real life was. Among the movie’s most plaintive sections are those involving her brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), the family’s tragic only son. (Amelia Gething plays Anne, the youngest sibling.) In their passionate intensity and in some narrative particulars — there are outdoor rendezvous and some spying through windows — Emily’s relationships with both Branwell and Weightman suggestively evoke that between Catherine and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” (It also summons up the glossy 1939 film adaptation.)

Brontë fundamentalists might object; Weightman, for one, was real, the affair apparently not, alas. Yet O’Connor’s liberties work for a story that, above all, is about art as an act of radical sovereignty. Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them. At once a woman of her time and free of its limitations, her Emily is corseted and unrestrained, respectable and scandalous, one of life’s astonishing escape artists who endures brute reality only to bend it to her own thrilling ends.

Emily Rated R for bodice ripping and drug use. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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'Emily' imagines Brontë before 'Wuthering Heights'

Justin Chang

Emily speculates about the life of the 19th-century English writer Emily Jane Brontë (Emma Mackey) in the years before she wrote Wuthering Heights. Bleecker Street hide caption

Emily speculates about the life of the 19th-century English writer Emily Jane Brontë (Emma Mackey) in the years before she wrote Wuthering Heights.

Given that there are few activities less inherently cinematic than writing, I'm surprised and heartened by how many good movies I've seen in recent years that have convincingly entered the lives and minds of authors. I'm thinking of A Quiet Passion , the Emily Dickinson biopic, and Shirley , about The Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson. You don't spend a lot of time watching these women scribbling with their quills or banging away at their typewriters, but you do get a rich sense of how their artistic sensibilities came into being.

The latest fine addition to this group is Emily , which freely speculates about the life of the 19th-century English writer Emily Jane Brontë in the years before she would write her one and only novel, Wuthering Heights . The movie takes significant liberties with what is known about Emily and her famous sisters, Charlotte and Anne, but as a non-stickler for biopic accuracy, I didn't mind. True or false or somewhere in between, this is an engagingly detailed and emotionally truthful portrait of a family of artists. Every character and actor leaves a vivid impression.

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In 'the brontes,' details of a family's strange world.

Emily is strikingly played by Emma Mackey, the French-British actor known for her work on the series Sex Education ; she was also the best thing in the recent remake of Death on the Nile . Mackey has the kind of searing gaze that cuts right through any period-piece decorum, and that makes her perfect for the sardonic, self-amused Emily. She's neither as sweet as her younger sister, Anne, nor as well behaved as her older sister, Charlotte, who's memorably played by Alexandra Dowling. Charlotte is studying to be a teacher and wants Emily to do the same, mainly to please their strict clergyman father.

But Emily's natural talent is for inventing stories and writing poetry, and also for speaking her mind with a boldness that leaves others unsettled. There's a dark side to Emily, and it emerges whenever she mentions her mother's long-ago death, something the others don't like to talk about.

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Of all her siblings, Emily is probably closest to her fellow-misfit brother, Branwell, an aspiring painter played by Fionn Whitehead. Their bond becomes even stronger after Branwell drops out of art school and sinks into alcoholism and opium addiction. One day, while they're walking the Yorkshire moors, she notices three words inked on his arm: "Freedom in thought" — a creed that also becomes her own.

And so Emily tells a familiar but compelling story of a woman rebelling against the expectations of her religious and image-conscious family. In her biggest breach of convention, she falls into a torrid romance with William Weightman, the handsome young curate who assists her father in his church duties.

Emily and William, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, initially loathe each other, which makes it all the more affecting when they surrender to their passion. Their affair is clearly laying the narrative framework for the forbidden love between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights .

That idea might sound overly simplistic, especially if, like me, you chafe at the notion that great art can only emerge from direct autobiographical experience. But even if the movie plays hard and loose with the facts — some have speculated that there was a romantic connection between Anne Brontë and William Weightman — Mackey and Jackson-Cohen bring so much heat and conviction that their love story sweeps you up in its wake.

But as magnetic as Emily and William are together, their bond isn't the only one of note here. I've rarely seen a movie this attuned to the emotional complexity of sibling relationships, especially between Charlotte and Emily, whose mutual exasperation never obscures the depths of their sisterly love.

Emily marks an excellent writing and directing debut for the actor Frances O'Connor, who's appeared in her own share of English literary adaptations like Mansfield Park and The Importance of Being Earnest . Her witty but unfussy script is rife with echoes of Wuthering Heights , which means it often plays like a ghost story. Much of the movie is set in dim, candlelit interiors, including one terrifying scene in which an innocent game among the Brontë siblings becomes a disturbing kind of séance. O'Connor keeps her camera tightly fixed on Emily even at her most anguished moments, when she seems to be teetering on the brink of madness. Maybe she is. But maybe it takes a little madness to create a work of art, including a movie as good as this one.

A Sensitive Movie About a Literary Oddity

A new film about Emily Brontë offers a fresh, provocative look at the misunderstood Wuthering Heights author.

Of the Brontë sisters, Emily has long been considered the most vexing . She was reportedly jovial around her siblings but disagreeable and timid around anyone else. Her equally tempestuous and aloof reputation left her friendless, and the novel Wuthering Heights —her bold, brutal masterpiece—incensed some readers while enthralling others. She’s a literary oddity, a creature whose reserved disposition seemed to belie a wildly inventive imagination.

In Emily , a new film about her life in theaters Friday, her difficult personality manifests as a near-paranormal force. Take an early scene, during which Emily (played by Sex Education ’s Emma Mackey) puts on a mask for a role-playing guessing game. She’s supposed to choose someone fun to perform as—say, Marie Antoinette—but instead, she channels her late mother. She speaks softly, spooking her siblings, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Anne (Amelia Gething), and Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). By coincidence or some inexplicable power, the winds outside pick up, the windows fling open, and the candles blow out. Her sisters cry hysterically, and Emily seems possessed, unable to remove the mask. The evening, which started in merriment, devolves into terror.

This probably never happened in the author’s short life—or maybe it did. The film’s writer-director, Frances O’Connor, told me that she’d read about how Patrick Brontë, the family patriarch, had received a mask as a wedding gift and encouraged his children to put it on from time to time for entertainment. Who knows? Perhaps Emily once embodied her mother’s ghost.

Then again, whether she did isn’t the point. Although the film traces Emily’s life leading up to the publication of Wuthering Heights , the movie isn’t a conventional biopic. There is no on-screen text informing the audience of the year being depicted, no flashbacks to her childhood, no gesturing at larger world events to contextualize her place in society. Instead, we get daring sequences that blend the natural with the supernatural, fact with fiction—a film “that kind of moves between ,” O’Connor said. She wanted to capture the spirit of Emily’s work, not the truth of her biography.

Watching Emily thus feels like reading Emily’s writing; it’s a vivid portrait of her mind that’s as romantic and haunting as Wuthering Heights . Rather than making a straightforward movie about Emily Brontë, O’Connor wanted to convey the transportive nature of the author’s classic novel. “I kind of disappeared into this world,” she recalled of reading the book for the first time at 15, absorbing the story on long commutes to classes. “I would get off the school bus in the middle of the city and really felt like I’d been somewhere.”

O’Connor’s interest in the author deepened with her poetry: “You can really feel her moving the pen across the page.” To her, Emily Brontë was a young woman who repressed her passions, someone whose creativity conflicted with who she had to be to others. “I feel like that is a common experience with a lot of women,” O’Connor said, noting the gap between “who they really are and who they have to present to the world.” Her unusually tactile film channels Emily’s heightened sensitivity. The handheld, subtly shaking camera makes the film feel as perpetually windswept as the Yorkshire moors, where Emily and her characters resided. The swelling, whooping score underlines Emily’s turbulent interiority. And the intimate soundscape picks up the rustle of every leaf and the undoing of every lace on her corset. When the new minister, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), delivers a sermon about finding God “in the rain,” the camera zooms in on Emily’s face as the noise of raindrops crescendos.

The film, I’ve also found, shape-shifts. The first time I watched Emily , I saw it as a depiction of how love and pain were inextricably linked in her mind. Halfway in, the film invents a torrid romance between Emily and Weightman, a tragic affair that serves as a foil to Emily’s relationship with Charlotte. The sisters are shown to be incredibly close, but that closeness comes from their appreciation for and resentment of each other. But upon rewatching, I saw the film as more of a ghost story than a love story, with Emily as a specter scaring others away with her untamed thoughts.

Emily fits into the subgenre of stories that reconsider misunderstood women in history through a strikingly modern lens, including the TV series Dickinson and The Great . But O’Connor’s film never indulges in anachronistic flourishes as those titles do; there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or Gen Z dialogue in the script. In never allowing Emily access to the 21st century, Emily comes off as only more emotionally charged. The character constantly seems caught between her mundane reality and her mind, in which she’s stored her most profound feelings of lust, anger, and fear. Emily is therefore a balancing act, as O’Connor put it, “between the real and the gothic,” and an examination of how Emily’s remarkably contemporary ideas of morality, faith, and love excited and tormented her in equal measure.

Emily has already irked Brontë purists , thanks to how liberally it alters many facts about the family. In real life, Weightman was never romantically linked to Emily, Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre was published before Wuthering Heights , and Anne—poor, perennially overlooked Anne—also wrote. But O’Connor, a Brontë scholar herself who gave her cast a list of biographies to study, notes that her changes were made purposefully, to express Emily’s fierce view of her loved ones. Besides, she added, “Emily herself was kind of a provocative character.” It’s only right that a film about her challenges—and maybe even disturbs—its audience in turn.

Review: Wuther true or false, ‘Emily’ weaves a passionate portrait of a Brontë sister

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“Wuthering Heights” was first published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell — a pseudonym for Emily Brontë, of course, and one that she adopted in tandem with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, in their individual novels as well as a book of poetry. “Jane Eyre” was published under Currer Bell; “Agnes Grey,” printed in the same three-volume set as “Wuthering Heights,” was attributed to Acton Bell. The Brontë sisters’ names and reputations would be established soon enough, but their use of male aliases was a not-uncommon safeguard in an era when female writers struggled to be taken seriously.

“Emily,” a passionate and imaginative new drama about the author’s short life and enduring work, deftly waves aside this and many other details: When we see Emily (a superb Emma Mackey) cracking open the first edition of her one and only novel, it proudly bears her actual name. Whether this is an act of feminist reclamation or simply an expository shortcut, it suits a movie that delights in hurling caution and historical fidelity to the Yorkshire wind. Written and directed by the Australian actor Frances O’Connor, making a vibrant feature filmmaking debut, it will surely madden sticklers for accuracy, which is all to the good. Those who demand strict conformity, at least in this absorbing and unapologetic fiction, are precisely the kind of people the fiercely independent-minded Emily can barely stand.

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The list of people she can stand is admittedly a short one. It would include her younger sister, Anne (Amelia Gething), gentle, kind and possessed of literary gifts that go sadly unexplored here, and their brother, Branwell (an excellent Fionn Whitehead), whose own wild artistic temperament and gregarious spirit are gradually subsumed by alcoholism and opium addiction. Less tolerable but still grudgingly granted a place in Emily’s affections is her older sister, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), who’s prim and well behaved in all the ways that Emily is withdrawn and rebellious. Charlotte is studying to be a teacher and urges Emily to do the same, the better to please their father, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), a rector in their home village of Haworth.

But the Brontë sisters’ true talent is for writing poetry and fiction, and “Emily,” which begins in bitterness and sorrow but ends in grace, is very much about the triumphant unstifling of that gift. In contrast with earlier portraits of the Brontë trio like “Devotion” (1946), which starred Ida Lupino as Emily and Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte, or André Téchiné’s French-language “The Brontë Sisters” (1979), it singles out Emily as the driving force in a movie rife with artistic potential. It’s Emily who refuses to relinquish the childhood stories that so captivated their youthful imaginations, even after Charlotte and Anne have long moved on. Preferring her fictional characters to any outside company, she retreats into a creative and social cocoon.

As Charlotte furiously informs her early on, the town gossips refer to Emily as “the Strange One.” And the movie, casting its heroine in a light at once sympathetic and fearsome, does not entirely dispute this characterization. Strangeness becomes Emily, and it also suits Mackey (“Sex Education,” “Death on the Nile” ), who has the kind of flinty, strikingly modern gaze that was made to cut through pretensions and pieties.

The camera (wielded by director of photography Nanu Segal) has an unnerving habit of locking Emily center frame, allowing her and us no escape. Seated quietly in a pew at church, her dark hair concealed by a bonnet and her eyes cast downward, she affects a posture suggestive less of prayer than of defiance. Freely wandering the wind-battered moors, her eyes taking in her surroundings and her hair now flowing past her shoulders, she is a woman liberated, wholly if momentarily at one with a gloriously untamed world.

O’Connor, an actor who’s chafed against corsets herself in such films as “Mansfield Park” (1999), is to some extent making a stealth adaptation of the already much-adapted “Wuthering Heights,” insofar as “Emily” is a (mostly) subtle record of that novel’s inspirations. The air is charged with melodrama and even a touch of madness. The candlelight flickers menacingly within the house’s shadowy interiors (sparely appointed by production designer Steve Summersgill). Emily’s fascination with death — and, more specifically, with her mother’s untimely passing years earlier — turns a tense family drama into a brooding Victorian ghost story, set to the operatic churn of Abel Korzeniowski’s score.

But it is also, by necessity, a thrillingly ill-fated romance, something that seems inevitable the moment a dashing young curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), sets foot in the Brontës’ parish. William’s own poetic gifts and not-inconsiderable good looks quickly set Charlotte’s and Anne’s hearts aflutter, though the skeptical Emily initially regards him more or less as Lizzie Bennett did Mr. Darcy. We know how that turned out, and once William begins tutoring Emily in French — never the best distraction from those pesky latent desires — it isn’t long before they’ve surrendered to a love beyond verbs, seen in a flurry of rumpled sheets and writhing limbs.

Even without that playfully bawdy montage, Brontë historians would likely object most strongly to this particular narrative liberty, armed with the widespread belief that it was Anne Brontë, not Emily, who was the object of Weightman’s affections. To these eyes, however, the potential problem has less to do with historical inaccuracy than artistic reductiveness. “Write what you know” is splendid advice, but it can also perpetuate an unfortunate canard, namely that great literary accomplishment can be born only of direct, autobiographical experience.

“Emily” may not entirely escape this assumption, though the intensity of Emily and William’s bond — which is to say, the heat and conviction that Mackey and Jackson-Cohen bring to their performances — is its own vindication. And O’Connor is shrewd enough to root the emotional core of “Wuthering Heights” in more than just a torrid speculative romance. If William is the Heathcliff to Emily’s Cathy, then so, in his way, is Branwell, something the movie establishes with early scenes of brother and sister mischievously spying on their neighbors. The intensity of their love, and of their shared alienation from their family and the outside world, is its own force of nature, even when Branwell commits an act of sibling betrayal that falls far short of brothering heights.

The tension and resilience of sibling bonds is crucial to the meaning of “Emily,” which may isolate and elevate its heroine but ultimately restores her to a place of intimacy within a family she loved and inspired. Her alternately tense and tender rapport with Charlotte, whom Dowling invests with intricate layers of disdain and sympathy, is especially moving in that regard. At one point, Charlotte cruelly dismisses “Wuthering Heights” as “an ugly book … full of selfish people who only care for themselves.” It’s another liberty; the real-life Charlotte, though a frequent critic and arbiter of her sisters’ published work, was hardly blind to the beauty of Emily’s masterpiece. The same can be said of O’Connor’s movie. Far from suggesting that art imitated life, it ends with the bracing suggestion that the Brontës, like any of us, could scarcely appreciate one without the other.

In English and French with English subtitles Rating: R, for some sexuality/nudity and drug use Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes Playing: Starts Feb. 17 at AMC the Grove 14, Los Angeles, and AMC Century City 15

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‘emily’ review: emma mackey excels as emily brontë in speculative biopic.

The 'Sex Education' star leads Frances O’Connor’s portrait of the most elusive Brontë sister.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

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She was an impenetrable figure: shy, reclusive, suspicious of new friends and more at home in the Yorkshire moors than any village or city. She was also brilliant — a gifted poet whose foray into fiction, Wuthering Height s (the only novel she wrote before her death in 1848), spins a tale so eccentric and passionate that it’s gathered a febrile following since its publication.

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The English-Australian actress Frances O’Connor ( Mansfield Park ) knows this, and that’s why her directorial debut Emily is not a strict biography — it’s a speculative project, an admirer’s serviceable interpretation of an elusive life. Using a series of finely detailed vignettes, O’Connor renders an ethereal portrait of the young writer. Emily builds on earlier Brontë depictions like Curtis Bernhardt’s 1946 Devotion , André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters and Sally Wainwright’s 2016 BBC television film To Walk Invisible . It lifts Emily out of the foggy shadows and into the center, clarifying her identity with a narrative of misanthropy, love and ambition. The film ripples with potential, even if it isn’t always realized: Emily deservedly treats its eponymous protagonist as a misunderstood heroine, but in reaching to assign her a legible identity, the narrative can’t help but tip into cliché.

Our first proper introduction to the young woman is Emily sitting beneath the foreboding gray clouds hovering over her rural home. In the Yorkshire moor, where the middle Brontë was raised and chose to stay long after her sisters left, the weather possesses its own unpredictable temperament. O’Connor and DP Nanu Segal take advantage of the landscape and its natural light: There’s an unforced, bleak intensity to the undulating hills, overcast skies and ash trees swaying in the wind.

Her comfort in the moors — she spends hours exploring the terrain — and active imagination make socializing with anyone outside of her family boring. People in town call her “the strange one,” a fact repeated by more than one of her siblings. “Is it nice having friends outside the family?” Emily asks Charlotte after the eldest Brontë returns home from a teaching job. The question is less a sign of curiosity than an expression of skepticism about life and people outside the moor. When William Weightman ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen ), a new curate, joins the Brontë patriarch’s church, his rousing, poetic speech woos everyone except Emily, who finds it banal and pompous. Charlotte, on the other hand, is charmed and quickly develops a crush on the dashing clergyman.

Emily makes some effort to fit in. She tries teaching alongside Charlotte but, after intense and frequent bouts of homesickness, is sent home. Her return makes her a failure in the eyes of her domineering father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), who demands Emily take French lessons with Weightman to improve her shoddy language skills and help her aunt ( Gemma Jones ) around the house. She begrudgingly accepts these orders.

The misanthropic writer manages to carve out a fruitful existence despite her obligations. Her friendship with Branwell, a wayward soul who oscillates between poetic and painterly ambitions, blooms. Their relationship is portrayed sweetly: They talk for hours in the moor, exchange poetry and spend their evenings hatching mischievous plans. But Branwell has his own troubles, battling alcoholism, an opium addiction and a troubling love affair with a married woman.

The messy triangle leaves Emily in an odd position, although she never explicitly has to make a choice between one man or the other. The film comes dangerously close to portraying Brontë’s creative pursuits as fueled mainly by these men and their warring desires (the two, naturally, despise each other). O’Connor’s reliance on vignettes is a compounding factor: These sketches play well enough, especially when accompanied by Abel Korzeniowski’s sweeping score, but characters and their motivations can only be outlined so much before we transition to another scene.

Emily’s craft comes in and out of view as her relationships with Branwell and Weightman become major sources of disappointment. There are gratifying scenes of her at work: Mackey hunched over a desk, staring out of a window into the moors, picking up an ink pen and furiously writing. Her imagination is, for the most part, treated as an otherworldly gift. There are, however, moments when Emily abandons its mission of demystification for the more challenging task of understanding what drove Emily to write. In those instances, the film attributes the poet’s skills to observational prowess and sturdy intuition. The answer to the question of how she managed to write Wuthering Heights becomes simple: by living and paying close attention.

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Going into Emily , the feature debut of director Frances O'Connor, it is important to understand that the film isn't a biopic. The title character may be Emily Brontë, the author behind literary classic Wuthering Heights , but it is clear that O'Connor, who also wrote the screenplay, opted to add a fictional slant in bringing this figure to life. While some might bristle at the unconventional approach, those willing to go along for the ride will come away enchanted with the story Emily tells. In many ways, it resonates with the present day without veering into anachronisms, and it paints a fascinating portrait of a woman who existed well before today's imaginations took shape. Led by a stunning Emma Mackey, Emily is a striking depiction of a woman embracing her individuality while crafting an iconic piece of literature.

Emily starts at the end, as its eponymous heroine (Mackey) struggles to combat a deathly illness. As they wait for the doctor, Emily's sister, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), inches close enough to ask a question that seems to have haunted her for some time: What prompted Emily to write her controversial novel, Wuthering Heights ? The film then unspools a fictional account of how Emily came to bring that perennial story to life, which, at the time of its publication, was polarizing because of its rejection of typical values. An outcast both within her family and her community at large, Emily seems to only draw comfort from her stories and her equally wayward brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). However, the arrival of a new local curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), sparks a new sense of discovery within Emily, one that helps her make her mark on literary history.

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O'Connor crafts Emily as almost a dreamy ghost story. From Abel Korzeniowski's score, that is at turns lively and haunting, to gorgeous landscape shots of the Yorkshire moors, Emily has the makings of a Gothic novel come to life. O'Connor draws from widely speculated parts of Brontë's life to tell her enthralling tale, and this freedom works to great effect. The film may not be telling a wholly accurate life story, but instead one that fits perfectly with how Emily Brontë and her famous work is often viewed in modern culture. There are aspects to Emily's story that resonate strongly today, namely her outsider status within a society that values more conservative thinking. Emily's refusal — or perhaps inability — to fit into pre-arranged boxes will stick with any viewer who has felt they cannot fall in line with a specific kind of lifestyle. Additionally, O'Connor weaves in instances where Emily suffers from things people today can put a name to — a panic attack, for example — but was perhaps looked down upon back in the 1800s. This only serves to further connect Emily's story with the present.

O'Connor is aided by impressive work from key craftspeople, including director of photography Nanu Segal and costume designer Michael O'Connor, who offer standout contributions. Segal grants Mackey ample time to shine by letting the camera linger on her face, sometimes even centering it directly on her to catch every flicker and shift; this pulls the audience even further into Emily's orbit. At the same time, those aforementioned landscape shots fully establish the breadth of Emily's world. Michael O'Connor, meanwhile, seems to make the conscious decision of dressing Emily in darker dresses than the other women around her, subtly setting her apart. It's only when Emily makes some steps towards conforming to those desired ideals that she ventures into lighter frocks. It also helps that the costumes themselves are gorgeous.

Emily isn't without some stumbles, though. There are some key developments in the script that come a bit too fast to truly feel their impact, such as a plot point involving Branwell far enough into the film to be considered a spoiler. The speed of Emily 's resolution can dull its overall impression. Luckily, though, the film has a major advantage in Mackey. The Sex Education star throws herself into the character of Emily wholeheartedly, giving a fully committed performance that asks Mackey to be ecstatic, curious, vulnerable, and vengeful at various points. Mackey brings her Emily to life so vividly, one wishes they had the opportunity to genuinely know her. As her illicit suitor, Jackson-Cohen nails the part of a brooding romantic interest. His chemistry with Mackey lights up the screen. Whitehead also deserves praise for his performance as Emily's libertine brother; flitting between carefree antics and underlying hurt, Whitehead gives Branwell compelling depth.

Emily is a period piece that wears its modern sensibilities on its sleeve, and it thankfully pulls off that high-wire act rather well. Pacing issues aside, it is a well-crafted character study of a person who really lived, though perhaps not quite in the way the movie suggests. Historical purists might not approve of the liberties O'Connor has taken with Emily , but those more interested in a Gothic-styled film that is both a romance and a coming-of-age tale will be entranced by what this has to offer.

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Emily releases in theaters Friday, February 17. It is 130 minutes long and rated R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use.

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‘Emily’ review: The power and fire of the gifted, strange Brontë sister

Movie review.

Late in her own relatively short life, the writer Charlotte Brontë published a brief “biographical notice” about her two sisters, Emily and Anne, both fellow writers who died tragically young. Of Emily, who died in 1848 at the age of 30 after publishing her sole novel “Wuthering Heights,” Charlotte wrote, “In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life …”

That power and fire is on display in writer/director Frances O’Connor’s beautifully rendered drama “Emily,” a film about the gifted, strange Brontë sister that mingles fact with imagination to depict Emily’s adult years. The Brontë family’s life was both quiet and wildly cinematic: Living in an isolated parsonage on the rugged Yorkshire moors, the three sisters and one brother occupied a world of imagination. O’Connor, an actor with some familiarity with period films (she starred in a fine Jane Austen adaptation, “Mansfield Park,” back in 1999), seizes that drama in the opening moments of “Emily”: As a dying, feverish Emily (Emma Mackey) collapses onto a couch, Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) gazes at her intently, determined to ask a question before it’s too late. Her gaze catching the pile of new printed copies of “Wuthering Heights,” she demands of her pale sister, “How did you write it?”

It’s a question that has captivated countless readers over nearly two centuries: How did the shy, awkward daughter of a parson, who never married and rarely left her rural home, write a book of such wild, passionate genius? O’Connor — who writes clearly in a director’s statement that, “This is not a biographical film of Emily Brontë” — gives us something of an answer: making her version of Emily a rebel who dives into a forbidden love affair, who lies in the tall grasses telling stories to herself, who opens her window late at night so as to hear the rustling of birds’ wings and to feel the dark air around her.

And in Mackey, she has an actor who seems to create her own light. You see in her depiction the woman described in Charlotte’s words; this Emily is indeed unworldly, uncomfortable around strangers, struggling to comply with what society expects of her. And yet the artist bubbles up inside her, emerging at moments both inconvenient (there’s a harrowing sequence at a party in which Emily dons a mask and takes on a ghostly persona) and poetic. Late in the film, O’Connor lets us hear the quiet scratchings of a pen, accompanied by Abel Korzeniowski’s beautiful score, while showing us images of the untamed landscape, the empty schoolroom, the bedroom of one now lost, the laundry blowing on the line. It’s a lovely, wordless answer to Charlotte’s question.

With Emma Mackey, Alexandra Dowling, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Fionn Whitehead, Gemma Jones, Adrian Dunbar. Written and directed by Frances O’Connor. 130 minutes. Rated R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use. Opens Feb. 24 at multiple theaters including SIFF Uptown and Regal Thornton Place.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Emily’: A Brontë-esque portrait of the author of ‘Wuthering Heights’

Frances O’Connor makes a striking directorial debut with a provocatively revisionist biography of Emily Brontë

The Australian actress Frances O’Connor makes a striking directorial debut with “Emily,” a provocative revisionist biography of the author Emily Brontë.

Played by Emma Mackey (“ Sex Education ”) with a beguiling combination of self-conscious reserve and feral intensity, O’Connor’s enigmatic heroine isn’t the reclusive, neurasthenic creature concocted by popular imagination (with the help of her older sister Charlotte, who took charge of the narrative when Emily died in 1848 at age 30). Here, O’Connor takes what little we reliably know about Emily’s life as the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman and self-effacing sister to three artistically expressive siblings, and fleshes it out with generous helpings of speculation and outright fiction, using Brontë's one and only novel, “Wuthering Heights,” as a lens on her own inner wildness and longing.

The conceit has an inevitable seductive appeal, as Emily — called “the strange one” by her neighbors — grows from a socially awkward misfit into a first-rate poet and writer, her talents largely hidden until they come under the appreciative gaze of her father’s curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Fans of “Wuthering Heights” — not to mention “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte’s equally famous entry in the family’s literary sensation sweepstakes — will instantly recognize Weightman as a leading man lifted directly from the Brontë mold: initially forbidding, judgmental and withholding, only to succumb to helpless adoration once the superior character of his beloved and the windswept romance of the Yorkshire moors have their desired effect.

O’Connor leans heavily into that fusing of the inner and natural worlds: There’s lots of twirling about in “Emily,” often amid drenching rainstorms while cavorting on those aforementioned dales. But for the sometimes hysterically pitched emotion of the movie — especially when the soaring choral musical score kicks in — “Emily” is at its best when it quiets down, allowing viewers to see Emily’s world as she might have perceived it. The primal wound she and the rest of the Brontës are working out, the loss of a wife and mother, is never far from her consciousness, especially when Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) pursues an education and ultimately a teaching career. Although Emily starts down the same path, her crippling anxiety sends her home, where her future clearly lies in being a helpmate to her fire-and-brimstone father, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar).

The arrival of Weightman on the scene promises to relieve Emily of such drudgery; so do the high jinks of her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead), a drinker and opium dabbler whom O’Connor depicts as bringing his little sister along on his not-quite-reputable escapades.

Did it happen that way? The factual particulars are less interesting to O’Connor than the mystical gifts of her protagonist, whose native sensitivity tips into outright possession in one of “Emily’s” most powerfully effective scenes, when Emily conjures her late mother during an impromptu séance. What begins as after-dinner entertainment takes on the Gothically supernatural contours of “Wuthering Heights” itself, just as Emily’s choice to tattoo the words “Freedom in thought” on her inner arm presages the ungovernable intelligence of Cathy, her creation and, by O’Connor’s lights, her literary doppelganger.

Dreamy and haunted, a product of hyper-dramatic atmosphere as much as the social and family dynamics of her time, the Emily of O’Connor’s telling emerges as a figure with spirit, magnetism and mystery. “Emily” is less a portrait of an artist as a young woman than the finding and freeing of a rebel heart. The movie may or may not be entirely true to Brontë, but it is surpassingly, and often deliciously, Brontë-esque.

R. At area theaters. Contains some sexuality, nudity and drug use. 130 minutes.

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Emily review: A fictionalised Brontë biopic that captures the soul of an artist, if not her reality

‘sex education’ star emma mackey plays the ‘wuthering heights’ author with profound sensitivity, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Frances O’Connor. Starring: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Amelia Gething, Adrian Dunbar, Gemma Jones. 15, 130 minutes.

“How did you write it?” asks Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) of her sister Emily ( Emma Mackey ). “How did you write Wuthering Heights ?”. This is where actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor begins her feverish reimagining of Emily Brontë’s brief life – not at the start but at the very end, Emily a wasted figure nearly consumed by tuberculosis. For O’Connor knows how tantalising that question of “how” can be to us.

Wuthering Heights was the only novel Emily wrote before her death, aged 30, in 1848. We don’t know much of who she was beyond those pages – she documented little about herself, and even her surviving diary entries diverge frequently into fantasy. The film, written and directed by O’Connor in her feature debut, stays faithful to that fervent sense of imagination. Having starred in Patricia Rozema’s own daring adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in 1999, O’Connor knows the rules of the period drama well enough to break them. Though it takes a liberal approach to biography, it’s so attuned to Emily’s creative spirit that it’s not implausible that this is how the author might have chosen to envision her own life if given the chance. Emily captures the soul of the artist, if not her reality.

“Her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life,” Charlotte famously wrote of her younger sister. “An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.” It’s this particular description that fuels much of O’Connor’s vision, which offers us a heroine whose innate inability to conform to societal expectations leaves her constantly misunderstood and frequently lonely. She’s a source of concern and frustration for her father, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), and sisters Charlotte and Anne (Amelia Gething). Her brother Branwell ( Fionn Whitehead ), her closest ally, is largely distracted by his own troubles with drink and opium.

It’s easy to read Emily here as neurodivergent, possibly autistic, as multiple academics have suggested. But O’Connor allows that interpretation to exist without enforcing it, carefully avoiding reductive depictions. There’s an equal sensitivity in Mackey’s performance. Her brows are often furrowed. Her eyes frequently downcast. She also plays her as a self-knowing woman with a profound and intense connection to the world around her.

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While Charlotte and Anne swoon over the poetic sermons of William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), the village’s new curate, Emily finds his words phony and trite. But when her father demands that she take French lessons from the clergyman, their heated philosophical debates quickly take on a carnal nature. It makes sense, really – the author of one of the most impassioned books ever written deserves an equally impassioned biopic. Mackey and Jackson bring true, tortured desires to their scenes, especially as they hungrily tear through the many layers of her voluminous gowns.

Emily , pointedly, does not wallow in the misery we like to ascribe to her short and frequently tragic life. There is great buoyancy and humour in the film. Here the Yorkshire moors – so dark and stormy in Wuthering Heights – are an equal source of wonderment and solace. The camera swims in Mackey’s eyes, in bold and confrontational close-ups, while Abel Korzeniowski’s score is a battle cry of violins which, at times, deliberately overwhelms the dialogue. O’Connor, in a sense, has challenged us to meet Emily on her own terms, even if those around her would not. “It’s an ugly book,” Charlotte says of Wuthering Heights . “Good,” Emily replies. At that moment, I could have cheered out loud.

‘Emily’ is in cinemas from Friday 14 October

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Emily review – the wildest Brontë sister is set free in full-blooded gothic fable

The author of Wuthering Heights is no sickly recluse in actor turned director Frances O’Connor’s sensuous, spine-tingling feature debut

“H ow did you write Wuthering Heights ?” demands a rattled Charlotte Brontë (Alexandra Dowling) in the opening moments of this inventive, urgent gothic fable that, like Andrew Dominik’s misunderstood Blonde , could hardly be mistaken for a drearily factual biopic. “It’s an ugly book,” Charlotte complains as her sister Emily ( Sex Education ’s Emma Mackey ) swoons beside her, a three-volume edition of the offending text (“full of selfish people who only really care for themselves”) propped next to a medicine bottle at her elbow. When Emily replies that she simply put pen to paper, Charlotte is unassuaged, insisting that “there is something …”. Only later, when the literary torch is passed on and she can make peace with her own ghosts, does Charlotte start to realise what that “something” is…

Punctuated with fades-to-black that accentuate its fairytale fever-dream quality, Emily flashes back to the days when the young Brontë sisters delighted in the stories they told each other. While Charlotte is set to be a teacher, Emily (known in the village as “the strange one”) romps across moorland, caressing trees and moss, rolling and falling in green with her beloved Byronic brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead). Her widowed father (Adrian Dunbar) preaches judgment from the pulpit, but new curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) talks wistfully about communing with God while walking in the rain, to the eye-rolling delight of his congregation.

Popular legend has it that the real-life Weightman was romantically involved with youngest sister Anne Brontë, but British-Australian actor turned writer-director Frances O’Connor ’s thrillingly confident feature debut imagines him being torn between the attraction and repulsion that Emily inspires. Emily feels the sharp cut of that dual-edged sword too, although initially she appears more smitten with her brother, who lands and then squanders a place at the Royal College of Art and has the words “Freedom of Thought” scrawled on his forearm. Drink and opium will lead Branwell off the rails, and the film’s subdued palette turns to lush, oversaturated hues when Emily first shares his pupil-dilating vices in a grassy paradise. Later, they will peer in through windows in the dead of night, fleshly precursors of Cathy and Heathcliff.

These outdoor scenes, filmed with sensuous, hand-held grit by Nanu Segal, who shot Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling , recall the passionate landscapes of Francis Lee’s awards-winner God’s Own Country . Meanwhile, the sonic juxtapositions of inner and outer worlds (plaudits to sound designer Niv Adiri) put me in mind of William Oldroyd’s north-east England psychodrama Lady Macbeth , the film that made a star of Florence Pugh.

More unexpected is the shadow that Kaneto Shindô’s Japanese chiller Onibaba casts over a startling scene in which a mask turns a parlour game into a ghostly seance. With remarkable elan, O’Connor conjures a spine-tingling vision of an unquiet maternal spirit who seems to sweep in with the wind to possess her daughter. Is Emily really speaking with the voice of Mother (Nature), or are we all simply caught in the overwhelming power of her imagination?

Having starred in Patricia Rozema’s revisionist screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park , and worked emotional wonders in Spielberg’s heartbreaking sci-fi epic AI: Artificial Intelligence (one of the most ambitious retellings of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio ) , O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness. Yes, Emily, into whom Mackey breathes intensely tangible life, suffers panic attacks when away from Haworth, but are these not simply the anguished cries of one separated from her first love? And while Emily’s angsty passions may fix upon Weightman, isn’t he simply in the right place at the right time – a convenient piece of garden furniture amid the rugged scenery that is her heart’s true desire?

Abel Korzeniowski’s score ramps up the gothic romance and adds a note of thunderous horror to otherwise demure scenes of cloistered walls closing in. Elsewhere, O’Connor makes pointed use of a vacuum-like silence to portray shock and bereavement – a momentary absence of life in a film that otherwise thrums with full-blooded vivacity.

Explanatory footnote added on 1 December 2022: For avoidance of doubt, ”pupil-dilating vices” accurately describes a scene close-up of Emily (as distinct from the real-world effect of opium on eyes).

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In Theaters

• February 17, 2023
• Emma Mackey as Emily Brontë; Oliver Jackson-Cohen as William Weightman; Fionn Whitehead as Branwell Brontë; Alexandra Dowling as Charlotte Brontë; Amelia Gething as Anne Brontë; Adrian Dunbar as Patrick Brontë

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Movie Review

Unlike her sweet sister Charlotte, Emily Brontë was never good at social gatherings. In fact, she really has never been good at people , truth be told. When Charlotte acquired a teaching position and they both went away to school, Emily found herself so overwhelmed that she walled herself up in her room. Soon after, she returned to the reclusiveness of her parent’s home.

So Charlotte found it something of a surprise when Emily began writing insightful and poignant poetry sometime later. And then she wrote a book—published under a male pseudonym—called Wuthering Heights . A fairly controversial book about morality and the human condition.

How did that come from dour little Emily?

What Charlotte and other family members never realized, however, was that Emily was not some static thing sitting in a corner. She could and can grow. She can change. She may not enjoy swarms of people, with their empty discussions and dissembling faces, but she isn’t empty herself.

She feels things. Desires things.

One of those things is William Weightman, a handsome young curate from the local church. When he first arrived, Emily could barely endure him and his flitting butterfly flirtations with every young woman in his public sphere. His beautiful eyes. His smile.

But that changed one intemperate night when she and he were caught in the pelting rain and took shelter in an empty, dilapidated cottage.

Disdain, on both their parts, began to shift that night. Feelings emerged. Godly instruction was pushed aside. A touch became a caress. A caress became … so much more.

But love is more than simply sweet ecstasies. Love is also pain.

All those dark sides of love can bring more change than one might ever imagine. Imagined or not, however, one can write of that change. One can put pen to paper and express that darkness.

And that is something Emily Brontë is very good at.

Positive Elements

As Emily’s story unfolds, we see that she is much more imaginative than many give her credit for. She talks through her made up stories when she’s alone, playing each of the characters in turn. We hear that this is something that she and her younger sister, Anne, loved doing. But Anne pulls away from the practice when she’s told that it’s childish.

Emily and her siblings clearly love one another. But their poor choices (and sometimes unhealthy interactions) end up hurting nearly all of them. The youngest Brontë sister, Anne, is seemingly the only exception.

Looked at from a certain perspective, the portrayal of Emily Brontë’s life in this film could be seen as a cautionary tale decrying lies and the selfish mistreatment of others.

Spiritual Elements

William gives a brief sermon at church, speaking about how he feels connected to others who, like him, pause to listen to the rain hit their roof. “God is in the rain,” he notes poetically. Emily, however, reacts negatively to Williams attempt at eloquence. “How does God squeeze Himself into all that rain,” she asks.

During a party game at a dinner play, Emily dons the proffered mask and begins talking as her dead mother. The portrayal is so eerily believable that Emily’s sisters and brother begin weeping and emotionally expressing their love to their lost mother. William, on the other hand, finds the ghostly performance to be shameful. We learn that the mask used during the game was a gift to Emily’s mother on her wedding day. Further, the family’s children had long used it to portray biblical characters and characters from Shakespeare.

Emily debates blind obedience to God’s word with William. “If God intended us not to think, he would not have given us a brain,” she declares. Later, as their affair comes to light among family members, William selfishly uses his “faith” as a reason to cover up their sin and lie about everything they were doing and feeling. Among other things, he tells Emily, “We have committed a mortal sin.” He also blames Emily for their lusty relationship, saying, “I think there is something ungodly in you.”

A pastor’s sermon warns parishioners to be careful of the things they read, lest those descriptions push them toward sin. And ironically someone leaves a note in a hymnal to do just that.

Sexual Content

Emily’s brother, Branwell, is forced to tutor a family’s children as punishment for a misdeed. But while tutoring, he seduces the kids’ pretty mother. We see him kissing her neck during a musical performance in a darkened room.

As Emily and William develop feelings for one another, their attraction begins to push boundaries of propriety. Soon, the two begin kissing passionately at any spare moment—including while working on Emily’s French lessons at church. We see them in brief scenes making love—sometimes while dressed, another time while covered by a blanket and one time while mostly undressed. In the latter scene, we see William, shirtless, and glimpse Emily’s bare chest in a scene that includes other intimate kissing and caressing.

Elsewhere, Emily puts William’s hand on her clothed chest, in public, to have him feel her rapid heartbeat.

Violent Content

After being caught peeping into a neighbor’s windows, Branwell is struck with a strap. Dogs chase both Branwell and Emily.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Emily’s eventual death is described as being a result of “consumption” (as tuberculosis was then called) and heartbreak.

Crude or Profane Language

Single uses of “h—” and “da–it.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Branwell smokes cigarettes regularly. We also see him drink at a pub repeatedly, getting quite drunk with his friends. He pulls Emily in to drink some ale, too. But she finds it gag-worthy and settles for a sherry. Branwell also carries a flask that he sips from on occasion. Emily smokes a cigarette once.

Emily finds some opium extract that Branwell has been using and she experiments repeatedly with it, particularly at her saddest emotional points. (The drug use is painted as a somewhat euphoric, positive experience.) Emily is caught under the effects of the drug while in a church service.

Other Negative Elements

Emily lies at times to her domineering father. And that is especially true when it comes to William Weightman, who’s hired to tutor her in French. (Her French does, however, improve markedly.)

Emily and Charlotte quarrel sometimes, generally over how others perceive Emily. “They call you the fool,” Charlotte cries. “I won’t let you drag me down. I won’t.” Emily mentions at one point that she repeatedly makes choices that she hopes will earn her father’s love. But he is a stern man who only speaks positively of her when her book finally reaches a modicum of fame and profit. (But by then, however, she is calloused to him and ignores his belated attention.)

Emily’s brother, Branwell, wants to be a writer as well. And he asks Emily to evaluate his writing. But in her anger over something completely unrelated, she selfishly savages him. In return, he later purposely hides something from her that upends her life and leaves her devastated. His own ill choices drive him further into a drunkard’s life. He begs Emily’s forgiveness from his deathbed.

Branwell coaxes Emily to join him and peep in a nearby family’s windows.

At the beginning of this well-staged period piece, Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte wonders how her sheltered, antisocial sibling could possibly have written a book such as Wuthering Heights —the 1847-published novel filled with emotional and physical abuse and challenges to Victorian morality.

“It’s base and ugly and full of ugly people who only care for themselves,” Charlotte says harshly.

The film Emily then goes on to speculate how that controversial tale may have been given life through a torrid love affair Emily had with a young and handsome church curate.

The resulting tragic biopic is at times something quite beautiful to see and hear thanks to first time-director Frances O’Connor’s reverent efforts. But O’Connor also creates a film that many will find unpleasantly embellished by drug use and fleshy sensuality.

Those R-rated wutherings ultimately lessen this biopic’s heights .

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Intimate Bronte biopic has sex, themes around addiction.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A willingness to learn. Finding confidence within

Emily was born into a world that favored her male

There is a lack of diversity as the film features

Death is a prevalent theme. A parent is seen hitti

Sex scene in a barn -- no nudity, but there is thr

One use of the word "gypsy."

Characters take opium on occasion. There is one ch

Parents need to know that Emily is a biopic of the 19th-century English novelist Emily Bronte -- author of literary classic Wuthering Heights -- and features drugs, addiction, and sex. Bronte (Emma Mackey) is a strong female lead, but also complex and flawed. She's intelligent, both academically and…

Positive Messages

A willingness to learn. Finding confidence within yourself. The joys, but also heartbreak of love.

Positive Role Models

Emily was born into a world that favored her male counterparts. But through her own brilliance, she succeeded. She is flawed, however, and is guilty of spying on people alongside her brother. Initially introverted, she grows in confidence when she finds love.

Diverse Representations

There is a lack of diversity as the film features White characters, pretty much across the board. But the film does center on a very complex female character.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death is a prevalent theme. A parent is seen hitting their child when telling them off. Characters are chased by dogs in another scene. Reference to a dead parent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sex scene in a barn -- no nudity, but there is thrusting. Suggestion that a character performs oral sex on another. Character's nipple seen in one scene. A character has their neck kissed by someone other than their spouse.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters take opium on occasion. There is one character who is living with alcohol addiction, which leads to a slow demise. Other characters drink alcohol throughout and a character is seen smoking too.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Emily is a biopic of the 19th-century English novelist Emily Bronte -- author of literary classic Wuthering Heights -- and features drugs, addiction, and sex. Bronte ( Emma Mackey ) is a strong female lead, but also complex and flawed. She's intelligent, both academically and emotionally, and succeeds in a world that favored the progress of men over women. Love is explored in all its facets; the joys of falling in love, and the sheer misery of heartbreak. The film features a few sex scenes that while featuring little to no nudity, are quite graphic. Drugs are also a prominent theme. Characters try opium and initially they are shown enjoying the effects. But soon Emily's brother, Branwell ( Fionn Whitehead ), falls deep into addiction with drugs and alcohol. There is also some smoking. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

EMILY is a coming-of-age story of the celebrated author Emily Bronte ( Emma Mackey ), which explores her journey from shy young girl to becoming one of the most provocative minds in literature. Drawing her influences from her brother Branwell ( Fionn Whitehead ) -- who spirals into addition -- and a complex romance with a member of the church, it all leads to her celebrated novel Wuthering Heights .

Is It Any Good?

This biopic about one of Britain's most celebrated authors is an encouraging directorial debut feature from Frances O'Connor , who brings her screenplay to life in a unique, but also familiar way. Emily does feel like a classic period drama at times. But likewise it's got a naturalistic feel to it. Its handheld shaky camera and close-ups truly put you into the same room as the characters, rather than have you feel like you're merely observing from behind a pane of glass, as though at a museum -- which can often happen with this genre.

What transpires is an intimate character study. But for that to work, a strong central performance is required. Thankfully Mackey more than delivers. She brings vulnerability as well as a mischief to the role. We get a sense for the writer's fallibility, but also the sharp and witty mind that lives within. The film could have perhaps had a more deft editing job, with the middle act waining somewhat. But the strength of the performances keep the audience engaged.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Emily portrayed sex . Was it affectionate? Respectful? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding sex and relationships.

Talk about the character of Emily. What were her strengths ? What were her flaws? Did she feel like a realistic character?

Were you familiar with Emily Bronte's works? Has this inspired you to learn more and read her writings?

Talk about the alcohol and drug use in the film. How was addiction portrayed? Were there consequences to the substance abuse? Why is that important?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 17, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : April 18, 2023
• Cast : Emma Mackey , Oliver Jackson-Cohen , Fionn Whitehead
• Director : Frances O'Connor
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Middle Eastern/North African actors
• Studio : Bleecker Street
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , Great Girl Role Models , History
• Character Strengths : Curiosity , Perseverance
• Run time : 130 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some sexuality/nudity and drug use
• Last updated : July 21, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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Wuthering Heights (2012)

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Emily (2022)

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Emily the Criminal

Where to watch.

Watch Emily the Criminal with a subscription on Netflix, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

A taut thriller that contains a wealth of social commentary, Emily the Criminal is stolen by Aubrey Plaza's terrific work in the title role.

Emily the Criminal gets pretty dark and the characters can be unlikable, but Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in the title role.

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John Patton Ford

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‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Leading Lady Karla Sofía Gascón Electrifies in Jacques Audiard’s Mexican Redemption Musical

Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez also star in the Palme d'Or winner's exhilarating Spanish-language (half-sung) portrait of a former cartel boss's life-changing transformation.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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• ‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Leading Lady Karla Sofía Gascón Electrifies in Jacques Audiard’s Mexican Redemption Musical 3 days ago

SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains some spoilers.

Like a rose blooming amid a minefield, it’s a miracle that Jacques Audiard ’s “ Emilia Pérez ” exists: a south-of-the-border pop opera about a most unlikely metamorphosis and the personal redemption it awakens in a stone-cold criminal.

Popular on Variety

The filmmaker got the idea from Le Monde editor Boris Razon’s novel “Écoute,” wherein the character’s mission is but one of countless questions raised about identity (in the book, Manitas wants to become his first love, who was murdered years before). But primarily-Spanish-language “Emilia Pérez” isn’t an adaptation so much as a totally different interpretation of that out-there idea: What if you took the poster boy for toxic masculinity and made them a woman — not à la Griselda Blanco (“Cocaine Godmother”), but in such a way that eclipsed the aggressive original persona?

Audiard starts by introducing Saldaña’s character, Rita, a defense attorney who helps scumbags go free, justifying her misgivings through song. Overstressed and undervalued, Rita accepts a potential client’s shady proposal, which means being driven out to who-knows-where with a hood over her head. Ultra-careful in order to evade potential assassination, Manitas swears Rita to secrecy before telling her why she’s been summoned: “I want to be a woman,” growls a man who looks like he wouldn’t hesitate to have her killed. And then Manitas opens his shirt and reveals his commitment to Rita (but not the camera).

At this point in the film, my sensitivity sensors were still wary. Early on, all references to Manitas are masculine, which is true even among the gender-reassignment doctors Rita flies around the world to interview. One can easily imagine such an assignment sparking a “Some Like It Hot”-style farce about the Witness Protection Program, and the film still feels like it could go either way (toward triumph or catastrophe) during the gonzo “La Vaginoplastia” number, which suggests “Myra Breckinridge” as Busby Berkeley might have staged it. “Changing the body changes society,” Rita sings to the surgeon in Tel Aviv (played by Mark Ivanir), who finally agrees to conduct the procedure, tipping off where the story is headed.

It’s not like Manitas can tell anyone what he’s doing, counting on Rita to stage his death and relocate his family to Switzerland. In fact, when the ex-capo reunites with Rita a few years later in London — now radiant, beardless and renamed Emilia — the lawyer tenses, afraid she’s come to erase the last trace of her past. Instead, Emilia asks Rita to bring her wife/widow Jessi (Gomez) and sons back to Mexico. According to press notes, Gascón (who plays Emilia) still lives with her daughter’s mom, and a similar dynamic emerges here, as Emilia presents herself as a long-lost aunt.

The scene that played best at Cannes finds Rita watching this reunion warily, as Emilia welcomes Jessi and the kids back into her life. Will they recognize her? “You smell like Papa,” one of their sons tells Emilia in a lovely reverse lullaby. “Emilia Pérez” would have been a very different movie if Manitas had found the courage to confide in the family. Not doing so sets the stakes for the rest of the film: Can Emilia continue to serve as their guardian? What happens if Jessi, who thinks she’s dead, should run off with new flame Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez)?

Such double standards add fascinating dimensions to the film’s second half, especially after Emilia decides to start La Lucecita, an NGO designed to help grieving family members find their “disappeared” relatives. In the process, Emilia also finds love. Apart from one scene where Rita worries that Emilia’s partner (Adriana Paz) may have figured things out, Audiard doesn’t distract himself with that old trope. Again, it would have been nice to see Emilia confide in others, but the film doesn’t treat fear of discovery as a point of suspense. Instead, Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 18, 2024. Running time: 132 MIN.

• Production: (France) A Why Not Prods., Page 114 production, in co-production with Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Pathé, France 2 Cinéma, in association with Library Pictures International, Logical Content Ventures, Les Films du Fleuve, The Veterans, Vixens, Casa Kafka Pictures, Pimienta Films, with the support of CNC, la Région Ile-de-France, with the participation of Ciné+, with the support of Canal+, France Télévisions. (World sales: Pathé, Paris.)
• Crew: Director, writer: Jacques Audiard, freely adapted from the novel “Écoute“ by Boris Razon. Screenplay: Camera: Paul Guilhaume. Editor: Juliette Welfling. Original music and songs: Clément Ducol, Camille. Music supervisor: Pierre Marie Dru. Choreographer: Damien Jalet.
• With: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir, Karla Sofía Gascón, Eduardo Aladro, Emiliano Edmundo, Hasan Jalil, Gaël Murgia-Fur, Tirso Pietriga, Jarib (Javier Zagoya), Montiel Magali Brito, Sébastien Fruit.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Fall Guy’ on Digital, a Spirited and Funny Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt Actionstravaganza

Where to stream:.

• The Fall Guy

‘The Fall Guy’ Comes To Digital, But When Will ‘The Fall Guy’ Be Streaming on Peacock?

Emily blunt claims some on-screen kisses have made her want to throw up: “i’ve definitely not enjoyed some of it”, in ‘the fall guy,’ ryan gosling and emily blunt give a perfect chemistry lesson.

The Fall Guy ( now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ) exists for two reasons: One, as stuntman-turned-director David Leitch’s affectionate tribute to his former profession. And two, to grant us, the undeserving masses, a romance between characters played by the two most attractive and charming actors in Hollywood, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt (it’s true and objectively indisputable; don’t fight me on this one). The film is loosely based on the TV series of the same name that aired 40 years ago, and allows Leitch to mine the things he’s familiar with, namely, self-referential humor (he directed Deadpool 2 , remember) and highly kinetic action sequences ( Atomic Blonde , and he was the uncredited co-director of John Wick ). Weirdly, despite all the star power and the promise of a good-time extravaganza perfect for the big screen, the film underperformed at the box office – it was supposed to kick off the summer 2024 movie season with a bang, not a fizzle. Frankly, I don’t know why you ridiculous people didn’t go see this movie. It’s fun!

THE FALL GUY : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a scene that isn’t supposed to be meta-, but unfortunately ended up being meta-: Stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling) takes a brutal fall on a movie set and ends up retreating and licking his wounds, which is a metaphor for the box office performance of The Fall Guy . IT SHOULD NOT BE THIS WAY. I mean, The Fall Guy is a pretty damn good movie and Colt Seavers is a pretty damn good stuntman, and they deserve better! Colt was doing pretty great before that, doing what stuntmen do – sacrificing his body to nail all the most difficult shots in a movie while the above-the-title star, in this case Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), takes all the glory and boasts about how he does his own stunts. Colt’s not butthurt about it, though. This is the business, and he knows it. It surely helps that he gets the girl at the end of the day, Jody Moreno (Blunt), the camera operator who wants to go sit on a beach with him and smoosh face after this silly film shoot is over. Too bad it ended early for Colt, who broke his back and sank into such an abyssic depression that he let a radiant human being played by Emily Blunt slip away. What a fool he is.

Eighteen months later, Colt’s parking cars and deep into schmuckdom when movie producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) stops sipping on Diet Coke long enough to call him. She’s in Australia, where Tom Ryder is starring in a giganto-budget sci-fi/action/romance mess titled Metal Storm . Ryder’s stunt double is kaputskies and they need Colt to come in and barrel-roll some cars and be set on fire and all that. No thanks is his reply, until Gail sets the hook: This stupidass movie is Jody’s directorial debut. The production is in trouble. If Colt comes in and nails the big action shots, he’ll save the movie. Will he win back the girl, too? He hopes so. He hops on a plane and shows up on set for this extravaganza-to-be that resembles an ungodly melange of Fury Road , Starship Troopers and Dune and boasts a logo that looks like a Metallica copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. Actually, the film REALLY brings to mind Cowboys and Aliens . Remember Cowboys and Aliens ? It was a movie I regretted paying to see. What a ducking fud that was.

Anyway. Colt shows up on set, flips a don’t-call-it-a- Fury Road -car like eight times, crawls out of the wreckage and watches Jody’s jaw hit the ground. She didn’t know he was coming, and now she’s all mixed-emotions about this. Dude ghosted her hard . You can still see the glue seams in her heart. There’s a funny bit where they discuss the “romance plot” in “the script” through bullhorns so everybody on set can hear them failing mightily to pretend they’re not actually talking about their relationship problems, and then she makes him get set on fire and thrown against some rocks over and over and over again because sometimes you just need to do a few extra takes, you know? Purely the creative decision of a director, of course. Gotta get the coverage!

Afterward, Gail, who I should note is a complete maniac, pulls Colt aside. The real reason she called him here? Ryder is AWOL, and that’s precisely why Metal Storm is shit-creeking it right into the tank. She needs Colt to find Ryder, which subsequently finds our man wild-goose-chasing all over Melbourne, which is when we realize this movie, The Fall Guy , is spoofing action movies in which everyday people can suddenly turn into expert pugilists who’ve also mastered parkour, gunplay and whatever skill it is that dictates that one survive insanely convoluted car chases, foot chases, boat chases and, of course, explosions. Is it just me, or is this all stuff specific to stuntmen? Could very well be!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You can’t watch Ryan Gosling play a stunt driver without thinking about the greatest film of the 21st century so far, Blue Valentine . Er, I mean, Drive . Other odes to stuntpeople: Tarantino’s Death Proof , Burt Reynolds vehicle Hooper , Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . And tonally, The Fall Guy is in line with the recent Jake Gyllenhaal Road House remake, which was similar in its winking noddery to 1980s action glories.

Performance Worth Watching: I feel like Gosling has been at the top of his game since Half Nelson – and that debuted 18 years ago. (I even liked First Man . You should try liking First Man too!) That he’s capable of balancing the sad sack/badass role in this highly comic comedy should surprise absolutely no one. That said, he’s too obvious a choice for this particular recognition, so let’s give the PWW to Ted Lasso ’s Waddingham, who gleefully steals a handful of scenes as the sociopathic movie producer.

Memorable Dialogue: While tracking down Ryder, Colt converses with a scummy drug dealer about his stuntman job:

Scummy drug dealer: They give Oscars for that? Colt: No. (Big long pregnant pause so everyone in the Academy can feel stupid about this)

Sex and Skin: Anyone else think it’s criminal to cast Gosling and Blunt as romantic leads and not even give us a PG-13 sex scene? Officer, arrest these people!

Our Take: I would love to see all of Tom Ryder’s movies, represented on posters in his trailer: You’ve got Annihilation of Valor , Action Pact and Bad Cop Good Dog , although I think those are just slightly tweaked versions of real-life Chuck Norris movies, which are all gems, I tell you, GEMS. Where was I? Right – what kind of pissant wouldn’t enjoy The Fall Guy ? Sure, it’s got its nose up its own ass, spoofing the making of movies, especially ludicrous overpriced high-concept tentpole blockbusters, but at least it references The Fast and the Furious and The Last of the Mohicans instead of, I dunno, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles or something. 

There have been many Movies About Movies And How Great They Are, some of which we’d like to pitch into the sea – The Artist and Mank come to mind; they’ve aged like milk in a sauna – but few have set themselves up to be their own punchlines like Leitch’s unapologetically flippant Fall Guy (if stuntpeople can be psychoanalyzed as masochists, why shouldn’t they also make themselves the butts of their own jokes?). Meta-comedy walks a fine line; it can be either sandpaper-underpants grating or flat as pancake under a comatose hippo, but this movie hits a large majority of its comedic marks, beginning with a joke where Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character says it’s too easy to see Ryan Gosling’s character’s face in a shot, so they need to re-shoot it. Now, the question of whether we’d rather see Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s face or Ryan Gosling’s face isn’t worth asking. Painfully self-evident, isn’t it? It seems as if Taylor-Johnson is good-humored about this, or at least assuaged by the opportunity to play a drawling McConaughey-type space cowboy in the movie-within-the-movie. Seems like a fair trade.

The crackling comedy extends to the romantic chemistry between Blunt and Gosling, who maintain a spirited, uptempo pace that keeps us on our toes and trying to keep up with an array of rapid-fire, multi-layered jokes (which Leitch shrewdly enhances with visual and physical gags). Without that core relationship, loosey-goosey as it can be – hey, Colt and Jody’s careers and happiness hang in the balance, so don’t say the stakes are low – the film might crumble under the weight of its postmodern indulgences, which range from jokes about CGI and deepfake technology in action movies (dare you to spot that stuff here!) to needle-drops that feel like product placement because the big ones are by Taylor Swift (this one’s admittedly a great gag) and Kiss (a reworked cover of “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” crops up routinely like a cockroach). 

I greatly appreciated a terrific sequence cross-cutting between a completely OTT car chase and Blunt singing “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” at a karaoke bar, and the coy gender reversal of the artist-muse dynamic as Judy realizes Colt offers the inspiration she needs to get Metal Storm off the schneid and ripe for hyping at Comic-Con. The film absolutely who-careses its way through the third act, which is calculated to pay mighty tribute to stuntfolk, and therefore emphasizes the action to the point where the plot all but disintegrates. Point taken: the people who risk life and limb deserve greater recognition, no doubt. But at least they have a sense of humor about it.

Our Call: The Fall Guy is a riot. You should’ve seen it in the theater, where it’s more bigger and better and more fun, but if you STREAM IT, that’s better than nothing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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John Krasinski’s ‘IF’ hits a box office nerve with $35 million debut

Cailey Fleming, left, and John Krasinski pose with the character “Blue” at the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “IF” at the SVA Theatre on Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Ryan Reynolds poses with the character “Blue” at the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “IF” at the SVA Theatre on Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

John Krasinski, left, and Ryan Reynolds attend the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “IF” at the SVA Theatre on Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Emily Blunt, left, and John Krasinski pose with the character “Blue” at the premiere of Paramount Pictures’ “IF” at the SVA Theatre on Monday, May 13, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Ryan Reynolds, from left, Cailey Fleming, the character Blue, voiced by Steve Carell, and the Blossom, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in a scene from “IF.” (Paramount Pictures via AP)

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Cailey Fleming, left, and Ryan Reynolds in a scene from “IF.” (Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures via AP)

This image released by Focus Features shows Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in a scene from “Back to Black.” (Focus Features via AP)

Actor Marisa Abela attends the premiere of Focus Features’ “Back to Black” at AMC Lincoln Square on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

This image released by Amazon Prime shows a scene from the documentary “The Blue Angels.” (Amazon Prime via AP)

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John Krasinski’s imaginary friends movie “IF” claimed the top spot at the box office this weekend according to studio estimates Sunday. Its $35 million North American debut was also a bit lower than some projections.

Is that a disappointment? An ominous sign of the box office times? Or is the final story on “ IF " yet to be written? It’s not just your imagination: In these bumpy early weeks of the 2024 summer box office season, in which nothing has been a runaway hit and every new movie has more and more pressure to succeed, “IF” hit a nerve.

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Cailey Fleming, and an army of A-list voices including Steve Carell, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Louis Gossett Jr., Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Maya Rudolph, “IF” was an original idea from Krasinski, who wrote, directed and co-stars.

“IF” leads the box office

• Read our review: ‘IF,’ imperfect but charming, may have us all checking under beds for our old friends
• Read more: This summer, John Krasinski makes one for the kids with the imaginary friend fantasy ‘IF’
• AP’s summer movie guide: Virtually all the movies coming to theaters and streaming from May to Labor Day

Paramount debuted the film, which cost a reported $110 million to produce, in 4,041 locations in North America. Internationally, it earned an estimated $20 million from 56 markets, adding up to a $55 million global debut.

“Families came out in force and they loved the film,” said Chris Aronson, who heads Paramount’s domestic distribution.

There are several somewhat contradictory narratives swirling around its performance as well. With its PG-rating, “IF” was the first major family friendly film to open in theaters in weeks. And unlike a front-loaded superhero or horror movie, family pics are often running a marathon not a sprint. Last June, Pixar’s “Elemental” was assumed to be dead on arrival when it opened with $29.5 million domestically. But it continued earning throughout the summer and ultimately made nearly $500 million globally.

“IF” got middling reviews from critics (it’s currently sitting at a “rotten” 49% on Rotten Tomatoes), but, as with “Elemental,” audiences gave it a solid A CinemaScore this weekend. The studio considers it a successful debut and is optimistic about its longevity as summer actually begins for school age children.

“I think it bodes well for moviegoing in general as we move into the summer movie season,” Aronson said. “Kids are out of school starting this coming week and I couldn’t think of a better film to be in the marketplace than this one: It’s new, it’s fresh, its original, and it’s such a heartwarming film.”

“ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ” continues to be a bright spot . In just 10 days, it surpassed $100 million domestically and $237 million globally. It came in second place in its second weekend with $26 million (down 55%).

But there also hasn’t been a major movie moment akin to last year’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” in quite some time. Last year on this weekend “Fast X” opened to over $60 million.

“This is a very unusual summer. It got off to an unusual start without a Marvel movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “The box office has been in a holding pattern 20% down from last year.”

“IF” wasn’t the only new film to open this weekend either. Lionsgate’s horror “The Strangers—Chapter 1” overperformed with a $12 million debut from 2,856 locations. The innovative marketing campaign staged some viral moments by bringing the “strangers” to major events, from the Trump trial to Coachella.

The Amy Winehouse biopic “ Back to Black " opened in North America to an estimated $2.9 million from 2,010 screens.

The filmed-for-IMAX documentary “ The Blue Angels ” also made $1.3 million this weekend from 227 screens. It’s playing on the premium large format screens through May 22 before flying to Prime Video on May 23.

The summer, which for Hollywood begins the first weekend in May , is still getting started and could rev up next weekend with the infusion of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “The Garfield Movie.”

Dergarabedian noted that Memorial Day weekend is a time when moviegoers play can play catch up with films they’ve missed and heard about. For a film like “IF,” which picked up over the weekend with word of mouth buzz, that could bode well. Still, there is no sugar-coating the reality that the 2024 box office is not going to build on 2023.

“On almost every level this is a non-traditional summer in the lineup of films and the trajectory of the box office,” Dergarbedian said. “But collectively these films should have a solid Memorial weekend.”

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “IF,” $35 million.

2. “Kingdom of hte Planet of the Apes,” $26 million.

3. “The Strangers—Chapter 1,” $12 million.

4. “The Fall Guy,” $8.5 million.

5. “Challengers,” $2.9 million.

6. “Back to Black,” $2.9 million.

7. “Tarot,” 2 million.

8. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” $1.7 million.

9. “The Blue Angels,” $1.3 million.

10. “Unsung Hero,” $1.1 million.

A Simple Favor ending explained: What really happened to Hope, Faith, and Emily?

At long last, A Simple Favor is on Netflix. This Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively movie will leave you guessing until the very end.

Lively plays Emily Nelson, a woman who seems to have it all together. Kendrick’s Stephanie is shocked to find out that Emily wants to be her friend, and the two start to hang out a lot. When Emily asks Stephanie to pick her son up from school, of course Stephanie is happy to do it. What she doesn’t expect is for Emily to go missing.

Stephanie uses her mommy vlog to get the attention of the people to find Emily. Stephanie (and the viewers) is sent on a wild ride looking for clues to Emily’s disappearance. She was supposed to have gone to Miami “for a few days,” and Stephanie finds a mysterious photo with the words “gotta have faith” written on it.

There are certainly clues all the way through the movie to figure out what’s going on. Let’s break down the twist at the end.

Emily is not who she says she is in A Simple Favor

One of the biggest twists is when Emily’s body turns up during A Simple Favor . Emily has died, and her body shows signs of heavy alcohol and heroin use. With a $4 million life insurance policy on her, Emily’s husband Sean becomes the main suspect.

However, Stephanie isn’t convinced. A trip to Squaw Lake Bible Camp shows that Emily isn’t even called Emily. Her name was Hope McLanden. Hope had two sisters, Faith and Charity, only Charity died when she was a baby. Hope and Faith’s story gets even more tragic as their father was abusive and the two identical sisters decided to burn their house down and go their separate ways.

Hope changed her name to Emily and became a success. Faith didn’t fare as well, and ended up coming into Emily’s life to blackmail her. Emily decided to drown her twin and make it look like she’d died so that Sean could collect the life insurance money.

Does Emily get away with killing Faith?

When Stephanie unravels the truth, Emily decides to get Stephanie to work with her. Emily wants to frame Sean as an abusive husband and a murderer. Stephanie isn’t willing to do that, but she does play along with Emily’s game for a while.

Of course, Emily is a step ahead of everyone. She knows that Stephanie has bugged the house and removes all the microphones and shoots Sean.

Does Emily get away with it? Not at all. Stephanie had livestreamed everything on her vlog knowing what Emily could do.

Emily attempts to escape but ends up run over by one of the parents at the school. She survives, though, so she gets to serve the prison sentence she deserves. Sean is a free man, and Stephanie’s vlog is a success after all the viewers due to Emily’s disappearing act.

Watch A Simple Favor again and look out for the clues now that it’s on Netflix.

This article was originally published on netflixlife.com as A Simple Favor ending explained: What really happened to Hope, Faith, and Emily? .

Here's When 'The Fall Guy' Crash-Lands Onto Digital

The action rom-com stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

The Big Picture

• The Fall Guy offers a blend of action, intrigue, and drama, paying tribute to Hollywood's stunt community.
• The film stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
• The Fall Guy promises an explosive viewing experience on digital platforms when it arrives on May 21, 2024.

Get ready for a thrill ride as The Fall Guy lands on digital this week, delivering high-octane action directly to your living room. Directed by the master of kinetic cinema, David Leitch ( John Wick , Deadpool 2 ) , the film not only showcases jaw-dropping stunts but also weaves an intriguing tale of conspiracy and survival in the cutthroat world of movie-making, mixed with dashing romance and slapstick humor . The Fall Guy arrives exclusively on digital platforms with a never-before-seen extended cut tomorrow, May 21, 2024.

Available on digital tomorrow, The Fall Guy offers a perfect blend of action, intrigue, and drama . With sequences that push the envelope on stunt choreography and a plot that keeps you guessing, this film is a tribute to the unsung heroes of Hollywood’s stunt community. So settle in for a movie night and prepare to be captivated by one of the year’s most thrilling films, particularly if you've missed out on seeing it on the big screen. The movie grossed $27 million in its first weekend, and added a little over $13 million in its sophomore frame, dropping to number two. Despite underperformance at the box office, the home release will be an action-packed experience, as the extended cut contains an additional 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage featuring more action, more laughs and more stunts.

What is 'The Fall Guy' About?

Starring Ryan Gosling as a seasoned stuntman, the plot thickens when—following an injury that takes him away from his job for a long time—he is drawn back in by the temptation of love and joins the set of his ex-girlfriend's (played by Emily Blunt ) directorial debut—an ambitious action film. Things take a dramatic turn as Gosling's character uncovers a dangerous conspiracy involving the film's lead actor, portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson . As the stunt sequences become real threats, the lines between film set and life-threatening situations blur, making for an exhilarating viewing experience.

The stellar ensemble cast is rounded out by the likes of Hannah Waddingham, Teresa Palmer, Stephanie Hsu , and Winston Duke , all of whom bring their own unique brands of charisma to the movie. Their performances, coupled with Leitch's expert direction, ensure that The Fall Guy is more than just stunt work—it’s a summary, popcorn movie that's the perfect thing to put on at the end of a tough day at work, the kind of old-fashioned movie that people say doesn't get made often enough these days.

'The Fall Guy' Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt Lead a Moviemaking Lover’s Dream

Who's behind the stunts in 'the fall guy'.

87North Productions, renowned for their action-packed cinematic projects, brought their signature high-octane style to The Fall Guy . Under the guidance of founders David Leitch and Kelly McCormick , the film showcases a blend of intense stunts and dynamic action sequences that highlight the company’s expertise. Leitch, with his background as a stuntman and action director, ensures that the company's productions often feature complex stunt choreography and innovative action sequences. Known for their work on other action-heavy films like Nobody and Bullet Train , as well as their pioneering work on the John Wick franchise, 87North has continued to push the envelope in action filmmaking, and The Fall Guy serves as another showcase of their commitment to thrilling, stunt-driven stories that leave audiences wowed by the magic of practical effects over CGI-heavy messes.

Whether you're a fan of high-stakes action or character-driven plots, The Fall Guy delivers. Don’t miss your chance to catch this explosive film on your favorite digital and PVOD platforms tomorrow. Stay tuned to Collider for more.

The Fall Guy

Colt Seavers is a stuntman who left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health. He's drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie, which is being directed by his ex, goes missing.

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The Office's Most Heartwarming Jim & Pam Moment Was Emily Blunt's Idea

The most touching moment in The Office between Jim and Pam was the idea of John Krasinski's wife, Emily Blunt.

The Office 's most heartwarming moment, featuring John Krasinski's Jim and Jenna Fischer's Pam, was Emily Blunt's idea. The moment comes in the two-part episode "A.A.R.M.," where Jim attempts to convince Pam of his continued devotion to her by having the documentary crew put together a DVD featuring a clip collection from the series showing off their blossoming romance from inception.

Per Slashfilm , in a recent The Office Ladies podcast episode hosted by Fischer and Angela Kinsey with Krasinski present, the former recalled pitching The Office creator and showrunner Greg Daniels how Jim and Pam could finally resolve their complications in the final seasons. Fischer could not quite crack how it would happen until a Blunt-inspired Krasinski came to the rescue.

'I Am Sad': The Office Star Shares Honest Reaction to Peacock Spinoff

"I remember clear as day, John, we were in the break room for some reason, and it was a Monday, and you came in, and you were doing your little shoulder shake that you do when you get real excited about an idea," Fischer said. "'I was talking to Emily (Blunt) this weekend. Listen, listen. Okay? What is the one thing that this couple has that, like, you wish you could have as a couple? They have their whole love story on tape. Like this documentary crew has been documenting this love story.'"

Fischer continued, "Like I remember you saying, 'Jenna, could you imagine if you could go back to that first date with Lee [Kirk] and, like, someone had taped it, and you could watch yourselves on that first date. Wouldn't you just, like, lose it?' And I was like, 'Oh my God, I would lose it.' And you're like, 'What if Jim asked the documentary crew to put together the footage, and he shows it to Pam?' And I was like, 'Oh my God, I would be a puddle.' And then we just all got so excited about this idea."

'I Will Not Be Showing Up:' Steve Carell Opts Out of The Office Reboot

John krasinski confirmed the touching moment was his wife emily blunt's idea.

Krasinski confirmed that it was indeed his wife Blunt who came up with the brilliant idea for The Office Jim and Pam moment, "That sounds like a Blunt idea. That sounds like Blunt genius right there. And I just stole it," he said. "It was so smart. By the way, I remember when they were putting that together, I was so excited to see it too, because we didn't know what they were going to put together. Oh God, it was so much. It was so much."

The Office is currently streaming on Peacock.

Source: Slashfilm.com

A mockumentary on a group of typical office workers, where the workday consists of ego clashes, inappropriate behavior, and tedium.