Emily

 I saw Emily at QFT and it was pretty, silly film. In that order. It's like a comic strip in a girl's comic like Judy or Mandy - a wild, misunderstood girl, lives in a buttoned up, stifling parsonage with an intractable and distant father, who favours her two siblings. She walks around the moors with wild hair and eyes, communing with the nature she loves and which inspires her. Oh, and she's a secret genius too. 

It is exactly like that, but this beautiful film also brought me to tears on several occasions. I'm obviously going through something, my emotions are serially unmoored, tears come unbidden at the slightest provocation. 

There are some gloriously daft bits in this film. People are constantly "looking in at your window". At one point Emily (the hypnotically intense Emma Mackey) digs up a buried mask from the garden, that she might hide her true feelings from her priggish lover, Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who is so Stephen Manganish, it felt like "Adrian Mole: The Crappy Curate Years" every time he was on screen). That said, the way the scene is filmed is so ritualistic, so weighted, that it transcends it's silliness. Almost. It's this sort of heart-in-mouth, wiley windy moor romanticism that renders the film both gawkily adolescent, while making you feel like Turner, lashed to the mast in a tempest, in a big wet shirt. It brilliantly navigates those two positions: it is poetic and clumsy, serious and silly. And always beautiful. If I were young and in love, I would adore this film. As it is, I am still the same person I was when I was young and in love, and those effects worked perfectly on me too. You will want to run down a hill being moody and intense, listening to "Pink Frost" by The Chills on your Walkman. That is it's total vibe. 

Abel Korzeniowski's music too, is wonderful. There is a scene at an opera where Branwell snogs his boss' wife, and the protagonists close their eyes to better experience the music, and there are moments in this film where I wanted to do exactly the same, though it would have been a disservice to the excellent photography and supple, searching direction. 

Then there is Emma Mackey - the strange one - the only Bronte sister not afflicted with ringlets. She is superb, with her wild, dark eyes and loose black hair, staring everyone down, defying convention, speaking excellent conversational French. Wandering the moors, luxuriating in the relentless rain, Stella Gibbons Elfine rendered stonily serious. She is remarkable. She haunts the screen. 

Some of the film is astonishingly corny. The repeated opening of windows as an inspiration to write, as though the Bronte's were channeling the landscape itself, antennae for the rough fuse of the moorlands, the black silhouettes of the wind-bent trees, the constant thrum of the rain. But you forgive it. Again and again you forgive it. This film generates a lot of good will. You want to love it. Adrian Dunbar is in this. He plays Patrick Bronte (formerly Prunty), a Northern Irishman living in Yorkshire. And he plays him with a Yorkshire accent. What? 

The spectre of folk horror rears its pumpkin head again but, after all, what is Wuthering Heights but folk horror? Or a flint-hearted soap opera. The more I write about this film, the more I like it. It never looks less than beautiful, and if it has nothing to do with the actual lives of the Brontes that's fine. It's a film. It's fiction. Emily Bronte is a character in a film called Emily. 

Frances O'Connor (whom I know only from "Bedazzled") directs with flair and style, lots of hand-held and elegant jump-cuts. It's tremendously assured for a first film, full of fluidity and wit, and featuring some lovely set pieces and a great compositional eye. 

There are moments where you feel you are watching an origin story for The Woman in Black or even The Innocents, as the moodiest Bronte glowers, her eyes Satanic mill dark, in the endless rain. Thank God Emily kept away from the kids.