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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 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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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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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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.

‘Emily' Review: Emma Mackey Glows in Frances O’Connor's Love Letter to Emily Brontë

The first-time writer-director shines a light on the troubled life of the ‘Wuthering Heights’ scribe.

There’s a very good chance that you’ve crossed paths with the literary legends that are the Brontë sisters at some point during your academic career. Their work is synonymous with required reading lists and by default, might also be synonymous with an eye roll. Regardless, their work earns its highly respected places in literary history. The more famous and far more prolific sister, Charlotte, wrote Jane Eyre , arguably one of the most famous pieces of literature ever. As you might deduce from the film in question’s title, Emily is not a story about that sister.

As a self-proclaimed literature lover, the idea of a movie about the lesser-known, more mysterious Brontë was incredibly intriguing, and it’s clear that writer-director Frances O’Connor thought so, too. She wanted to tell the story of a young woman who didn’t feel like her story was worth telling. Aside from the fact that she wrote the famous Gothic novel Wuthering Heights , very little is known about Emily Brontë . O’Connor saw this lack of information not as an obstacle, but as an opportunity to figure out the kind of person Emily might have been by interpreting her work. This means the film is more closely aligned with fiction than a biopic. For the origin story purists out there, this might be a bit irritating, but it actually feels like the proper and more entertaining way to honor and explore the life of such an enigmatic figure.

The film’s opening scene is very deliberate as it starts at the debilitating end of the author’s life. At just 30 years old, Emily ( Emma Mackey ) was dying from tuberculosis. But it’s in her final few moments that the rebellious side she’s been told to suppress emerges and her complicated dynamic with her sisters is on full display. She had just finished writing Wuthering Heights —her first and only novel—and her protective yet judgmental sister Charlotte ( Alexandra Dowling ) is desperate for answers. “How did you write it?” she asks in a quivering voice. “I took my pen and put it to paper,” a severely ill Emily sharply responds, much to her sister’s agitation.

RELATED: In Francis O'Connor's 'Emily,' What's Fact and What's Fiction?

Charlotte’s voice is laced with disdain—not curiosity—when she questions her sister’s intentions. “Why is it so hard for you to believe that your sister could write something of merit?” Emily retorts. Deeply disturbed by her sister for writing such a scandalous story, Charlotte can’t help but exclaim, “It’s an ugly book. It’s base, and ugly, and full of selfish people who only care for themselves!” Emily’s response? “Good.” This exchange in Emily’s final moments speaks volumes about her life and sets the somber tone for the story that is about to unfold. It’s a heartbreaking way to start the film, but an effective one, especially as we come to learn how pivotal this exchange would be for Charlotte.

Mackey, best known for playing the gives-zero-effs Maeve in Sex Education , disappears into the role of the meek yet bold, hesitant yet adventurous Emily Brontë. She holds the burden of 1840s societal and familial expectations in her bones, rarely ever cracking a smile. She really only feels compelled to do so when she’s spending time in the luscious grassy hills of the small village of Haworth in West Yorkshire England either by herself speaking the parts of different characters she’s dreamed up, or sneaking outside her comfort zone with her imaginative brother Branwell ( Fionn Whitehead ).

Unlike practically everyone else in her life, Branwell encourages her creativity. Of course, his creative leanings are supported whereas Emily is literally dubbed “the strange one.” Charlotte shamelessly insults her sister and attempts to dissuade her from pursuing writing, which would prove to be incredibly ironic. Early on, we meet the biggest oppressive force in Emily’s life: her callous father Reverend Patrick ( Adrian Dunbar ). Hardened by the death of his wife and being a single parent raising four children ( Amelia Gething plays Emily’s more cheerful sister Anne), Patrick is fixated on what he deems an appropriate education and tending to his congregation. Charlotte, visiting from school and eyeing up graduation, returns home to praise from their hard-to-impress father.

News of Charlotte’s friend Ellen ( Sacha Parkinson ) staying with them plus the addition of William Weightman ( Oliver Jackson-Cohen ), Patrick’s assistant priest, is sensory overload for Emily. Unlike her sisters who salivate at the sight of the charming new curate, Emily is harder to impress. She’s frustrated by her sisters’ inauthentic behavior, as they light up with smiles and dish out compliments to William when he enters a room, yet criticize his sermons when he’s out of earshot. “But any man can speak. What I want to know is, can he actually do, ” Emily boldly asks. Adding to this frustration is the fact that Patrick assigned William to tutor Emily in French.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this friction between Emily and William blossoms into an intense and passionate love affair. The movie quickly takes the form of a romance as the two sneak off to the remote parts of the countryside to meet up. What is surprising, however, is the film’s depiction of Emily’s writing journey. Given that Wuthering Heights was the topic of discussion on her deathbed in the opening scene and is really the only work she is known for, it was interesting how her relationship with writing seemed to take a backseat to her relationships with her siblings and William.

Granted, Emily uses these relationships—especially the one with William—as inspiration for the core story of Wuthering Heights , which is about the tragic and forbidden relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. That being said, the story craved more attention to Emily’s love-hate relationship with writing. The love she has for creating characters and scenarios is pure and contagious, and emphasized with warm hues when she is lying in bed with her sister talking about the craft. William’s extreme reaction when he realizes the paper he was reading was Emily’s poetic writing (he quite literally drops it on the floor in shame) is a great indication of how women's writing was received during the time. But aside from these sweet and small moments peppered throughout the film, and a charming tease toward the end of Emily finally putting quill to paper, the "writing" of it all felt a bit like an afterthought.

The detailed production design and the homage to the titular character’s deep appreciation of nature are two of Emily ’s strengths. The inclusion of and focus on the mysterious porcelain mask that the family was gifted in real life is also something Brontë admirers will recognize and appreciate. The power that a figurative and literal disguise can have over you—for better or worse—is explored in a very artistically satisfying way. Elements of the supernatural are briefly touched upon in a visually potent scene when Emily wears the mask and speaks to her family and friends while channeling her late mother. Similarly, Abel Korzeniowski ’s score is beautiful and strategic. Interspersed between tense conversations Emily has with her sisters are blissful moments frolicking in nature underneath a sweeping score that never ceases to elevate the story.

Emily’s endearing bond with her brother, Branwell, is the beating heart of the film, making his increasing reliance on opium and alcohol all the more devastating. Whitehead shines as the pure and happy soul who loves nothing more than to dissect the power of storytelling while his head is in the clouds. It’s he who gives Emily the confidence to embrace her inner weird loudly and proudly. When she tells him that people think she is strange, he reminds her that everyone is strange if you look at them long enough. He convinces Emily to shed her timidity and yell “freedom in thought,” a powerful phrase that lights up a fire inside them and temporarily releases them of their woes. Branwell’s fearlessness is both his greatest strength and his Achilles heal, making him more of a cautionary tale.

Director Frances O’Connor effortlessly immerses the audience into Emily’s heart, soul, and mind in this refreshing, storybook-like origin story for a reclusive, misunderstood, and underappreciated author. Heavily influenced and inspired by Emily Brontë’s sole work, Emily is equally mysterious as it is charming as it honors the daunting and exhilarating feeling you get when you put a pen to a blank page.

Emily is in theaters now.

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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

Arts & Culture Critic

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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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‘Emily’ Review: Emma Mackey Breaks Out as the ‘Strangest’ Brontë in Frances O’Connor’s Lovely Debut

The 'Wuthering Heights' author is warmly embraced and gently released by actor-turned-filmmaker O'Connor, in a period drama with a subtly modern sensibility.

By Jessica Kiang

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But that quickly becomes the point, with Mackey able to convey simultaneously that this is all the world her character has ever known, that she loves it deeply, and that she is entirely bewildered by it. Most of her interactions are clouded by incomprehension at why things that are so clear to her should seem so peculiar to everyone else. In a fit of frustration at her unworldiness, Emma’s elder sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling, by turns sweet and severe, like a peppered strawberry) tells her that she is called “the strange one” in the village. Being ahead of your time, while you’re still living through it, looks a lot like simply being out of your time. 

Because “Emily,” as well as illuminating Brontë’s close, conspiratorial relationship with her wastrel brother Branwell (“Dunkirk’s” Fionn Whitehead), details an ahistorical, torrid romance between the author and her father’s curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). (The real Weightman was romantically linked to Anne, not Emily, meaning poor old Anne gets short shrift once again compared to her more famous sisters.) Weightman’s first sermon, in which he talks in sensual Byronic language about loving the wildness of the area and of God being “in the rain,” is amusingly implied to set the loins of the lady congregants a-quiver. But not Emily’s. Observing Charlotte’s attraction to the man, Emily warns her that he is not to be trusted. But when Charlotte leaves for a teaching position — at a school that also briefly employs Emily before she is sent home again, overwhelmed — Emily and Weightman grow closer, over French lessons that turn into spirited, French-language sparring sessions.    

Of course their fling, portrayed with surprising sexiness, cannot last. And Branwell’s decline into alcoholism and drug use, coupled with Charlotte’s increasing embrace of the primly respectable real world over the liberated imaginary kingdoms the siblings created as children, causes Emily pain. As well as a doomed romance, the film is also a singularly moving investigation into the mechanisms of sibling relationships that are forged in soulmate-style love, but tinged with rivalry and spite.

DP Nanu Segal’s photography is pretty but not prettified, and integral to the contemporary vibe. The subtle shake of the elegant, handheld camerawork becomes more pronounced outdoors, as though caught in the blustery dampness of the moors outside Haworth parsonage, the Brontë residence. Inside, the camera, dim with cloud-filtered daylight, settles pensively into rooms scuffed and unfussy, without a hint of chintz, sometimes pulling a trio of faces into a circle of candlelight out of a pure black background. Set to Abel Korzeniowski’s exceptional score, which is tempestuous and classical but frays at the edges into scraping violins, the filmmaking at times borders on the expressionistic, without ever betraying the traditional period form. 

Reviewed online Sept. 14, 2022. (In Toronto Film Festival — Platform). Running time: 130 MIN. 

• Production: (U.K.) A Bleecker Street and Ingenious Media in association with Warner Bros. Pictures, Embankment Films, The Post Republic presentation of a Tempo Productions, BeaglePug with Arenmedia production. (World sales: Embankment Films, London). Producers: Piers Tempest, Robert Connolly, David Barron. Executive producers: Robert Patterson, Jo Bamford, Abel Korzeniowski, Tim Haslam, Hugo Grumbar, Peter Touche, Jamie Jessop, Andrea Scarso, Michael Reuter, Sebastian Barker, Oliver Parker.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Frances O'Connor Camera: Nanu Segal. Editor: Sam Sneade. Music: Abel Korzeniowski.
• With: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Adrian Dunbar, Amelia Gething, Gemma Jones.

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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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‘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: mackey soars in dreamy, gothic-inspired twist on typical biopic.

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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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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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• DVD & Streaming
• Biography/History , Drama

Content Caution

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

Home Release Date

• April 18, 2023
• Frances O'Connor

Distributor

• Bleeker Street Films

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 .

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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.

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Wuthering Heights (2012)

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

Emma Mackey gives a superb performance in Frances O’Connor’s speculative romantic drama about the author of ‘Wuthering Heights’

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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 When: Opens Friday Where: Limited release Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

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"Emily" imagines the transformative, exhilarating, and uplifting journey to womanhood of a rebel and a misfit, one of the world's most famous, enigmatic, and provocative writers, who died, t... Read all "Emily" imagines the transformative, exhilarating, and uplifting journey to womanhood of a rebel and a misfit, one of the world's most famous, enigmatic, and provocative writers, who died, too soon, at age 30. "Emily" imagines the transformative, exhilarating, and uplifting journey to womanhood of a rebel and a misfit, one of the world's most famous, enigmatic, and provocative writers, who died, too soon, at age 30.

• Frances O'Connor
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• 75 User reviews
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• 5 wins & 11 nominations

• Emily Brontë

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• Trivia Actress Frances O'Connor 's feature-film directorial debut.
• Goofs A first edition of "Wuthering Heights" is shown as being attributed to Emily Brontë. It was originally published under the pen name Ellis Bell and only appeared under her real name after her death.

Charlotte Brontë : Someone should see these.

Emily Brontë : [angry] No! The end!

Charlotte Brontë : You deserve for someone to see.

Emily Brontë : Someone did! Someone did see them! You!

[closes the door loudly]

User reviews 75

• abiluptonlevy
• Oct 24, 2022
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• October 14, 2022 (United Kingdom)
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• £6,000,000 (estimated)
• Feb 19, 2023

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Movie Review: ‘IF,’ imperfect but charming, may have us all checking under beds for our old friends

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

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

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How do you make a kid’s movie that appeals not only to the kids, but the adults sitting next to them? Most movies try to achieve this by throwing in a layer of wink-wink pop culture references that’ll earn a few knowing laughs from parents but fly nicely over the heads of the young ones.

So let’s credit John Krasinski for not taking the easy way out. Writing and directing (and acting in, and producing) his new kid’s movie, “IF,” Krasinski is doing his darndest to craft a story that works organically no matter the age, with universal themes — imagination, fear, memory — that just hit different depending on who you are.

Or maybe sometimes, they hit the same — because Krasinski, who wanted to make a movie his kids could watch (unlike his “Quiet Place” thrillers), is also telling us that sometimes, we adults are more connected to our childhood minds than we think. A brief late scene that actually doesn’t include children at all is one of the most moving moments of the film – but I guess I would say that, being an adult and all.

There’s only one conundrum: “IF,” a story about imaginary friends (get it?) that blends live action with digital creatures and some wonderful visual effects (and cinematography by Janusz Kaminski), has almost too many riches at its disposal. And we’re not even talking about the Who’s Who of Hollywood figures voicing whimsical creatures: Steve Carell, Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper, Jon Stewart, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Maya Rudolph, Emily Blunt, Sam Rockwell, and the late Louis Gosset Jr. are just a few who join live stars Ryan Reynolds and Cailey Fleming. Imagining a table read makes the head spin.

The issue is simply that with all the artistic resources and refreshing ideas here, there’s a fuzziness to the storytelling itself. Just who is actually doing what and why they’re doing it — what are the actual mechanics of this half-human, half-digital world? — occasionally gets lost in the razzle-dazzle.

Blossom, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Cailey Fleming in a scene from “IF.” (Paramount Pictures via AP)

But, still, everything looks so darned lovely, starting with the pretty, brownstone-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights in New York City, where our story is chiefly set. We begin in flashback, with happy scenes of main character Bea as a little girl, playing with her funloving parents (Krasinski and Catharine Daddario). But soon we’re sensing Mom may be sick — she’s wearing telltale headscarves and hats — and it becomes clear what’s happening.

Bea is 12 when she arrives with a suitcase at her grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, filled with her old paint sets and toys. Grandma (Fiona Shaw, in a deeply warm performance) offers the art supplies, but Bea tells her: “I don’t really do that anymore.”

She says something similar to her father, visiting him in the hospital (it takes a few minutes to figure out that they’ve come to New York, from wherever they live, so Dad can have some sort of heart surgery.) He tells Bea he’s not sick, just broken, and needs to be fixed. Hoping to keep her sense of fun alive, he jokes around, but she says sternly: “Life doesn’t always have to be fun.”

And then the creatures start appearing, visible only to Bea.

We first meet a huge roly-poly bundle of purple fur called “Blue” (Carell.) Yes, we said he was purple. The kid who named him was color-blind. These, we soon understand, are IFs —imaginary friends — who’ve been cut loose, no longer needed. There’s also a graceful butterfly called Blossom who resembles Betty Boop (Waller-Bridge). A winsome unicorn (Blunt). A smooth-voiced elderly teddy bear (Gossett Jr., in a sweet turn.) We’ll meet many more.

Supervising all of them is Cal (Ryan Reynolds.) An ornery type, at least to begin with, he’s feeling rather overworked, trying to find new kids for these IFs. But now that Bea has found Cal living atop her grandmother’s apartment building, she’s the chosen helper.

The pair — Reynolds and the sweetly serious Fleming have a winning chemistry — head to Coney Island on the subway, where Cal shows Bea the IF “retirement home.” This is, hands down, the most delightful part of the movie. Filmed at an actual former retirement residence, the scene has the look down pat: generic wall-to-wall carpeting, activity rooms for CG-creature group therapy sessions, the nail salon. And then the nonagenarian teddy bear gives Bea a key bit of advice: all she need do is use her imagination to transform the place. And she does, introducing everything from a spiffy new floor to a swimming pool with Esther Williams-style dancers to a rock concert with Tina Turner.

Cailey Fleming and Ryan Reynolds in a scene from “IF.” (Jonny Cournoyer/Paramount Pictures via AP)

The movie moves on to Bea’s matchmaking efforts. A tough nut to crack is Benjamin (Alan Kim), an adorable boy in the hospital who favors screens and seems to have trouble charging his own imagination (spoiler alert: that’ll get fixed).

There are segments here that feel like they go on far too long, particularly when Bea, Cal and Blue track down Blue’s now-adult “kid” (Bobby Moynihan of “Saturday Night Live”), now nervously preparing for a professional presentation.

Still, the idea that adults could still make use of their old “IFs” at difficult times — and, to broaden the thought, summon their dormant sense of whimsy, as a closing scene captures nicely — is a worthwhile one. And by movie’s end, one can imagine more than one adult in the multiplex running home, checking under the bed, hoping to find a trusted old friend.

“IF,” a Paramount release, has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association “for thematic elements and mild language.” Running time: 104 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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Review: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt are explosively entertaining in stuntman action comedy ‘The Fall Guy’

Jason Fraley | [email protected]

May 10, 2024, 2:21 PM

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Hopes were high for “The Fall Guy” as Hollywood combined two blockbuster stars from last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon with “Barbie” alum Ryan Gosling teaming with “Oppenheimer” alum Emily Blunt.

All week long, box-office pundits have been quick to point out that “The Fall Guy” underwhelmed in its opening weekend, earning just $28.5 million domestically and $65.4 million globally compared to its ballooning $130 million budget.

Don’t worry, it’s still the No. 1 movie in America right now, and for all its action set pieces and complicated plotting, my wife and I had a blast of a date night watching two blockbuster fan favorites of our modern era who are charming as hell together on screen (if you missed them on “Saturday Night Live,” fire it up on Peacock now).

Loosely based on the 1980s TV series starring Lee Majors, the film follows Hollywood stuntman Colt Seavers (Gosling), who falls in love with camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt). Years later after rehabbing back from injury, Colt lands a comeback job on the set of an alien action flick, which just happens to be Jody’s directorial debut. Can they rekindle their romance amidst the real-life danger of serial attacks against stuntmen?

Who knew that the kid from “Remember the Titans” (2000) would become such a MOVIE STAR in “The Notebook” (2004)? His kiss in the rain has Nicholas-Sparked 20 years of gems: “Half Nelson” (2006), “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), “Blue Valentine” (2010), “Crazy Stupid Love” (2011), “The Ides of March” (2011), “The Big Short” (2015), “The Nice Guys” (2016), “La La Land” (2016), “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), “First Man” (2018) and “Barbie” (2023).

Now, Gosling returns to the role of a Hollywood stunt driver like the arthouse action flick “Drive” (2011), but this time he’s not silent but deadly. In fact, he’s anything but quiet, cracking zingers at every turn as he expertly rolls cars, rappels down buildings and catapults into rocks for multiple takes, proving it’s not “his destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility.” Colt finds that his bruised and battered body is easier to mend than his broken heart.

Enter Blunt, who has become a fan favorite in “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), “Looper” (2012), “Sicario” (2015), “The Girl on the Train” (2016), “Mary Poppins Returns” (2018) and “Jungle Cruise” (2021). Her best banter remains with Tom Cruise in the “Live, Die, Repeat” premise of “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), while her best work remains her intensely silent bathtub childbirth in her husband John Krasinski’s brilliant horror flick “A Quiet Place” (2018).

Together, Blunt and Gosling mine magnetic chemistry with wonderful little moments like Gosling tightening the drawstring of Blunt’s hat under her chin, or Blunt asking Gosling to roll down his truck window as he wistfully blares Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” These may seem like small jokes in a movie filled with bombastic action sequences, but they are the ones that we remember long after our popcorn has been blown to bits by explosions.

Surrounding the lovebirds is a stellar supporting cast of Hannah Waddingham (“Ted Lasso”) as controlling producer Gail Meyer; Winston Duke (“Black Panther”) as Colt’s stunt coordinator Dan Tucker; Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Nocturnal Animals”) as jealous action star Tom Ryder; Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”) as Tom’s girlfriend Iggy Starr; and Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) as Tom’s assistant Alma Milan.

Hsu’s sword fight proves the enduring action chops of “John Wick” director David Leitch, who reunites with “Hobbs & Shaw” screenwriter Drew Pearce. His greatest directorial flourish is a split-screen phone call with hilariously symmetrical compositions punctuated by jokes waiting just off screen. Leitch even redeems himself from the dead dog of “John Wick” by having a four-legged friend join in the fun — Action Dog to the rescue!

While the script provides plenty of laugh-out-loud lines, the romantic subplot is easier to follow than the murder-mystery plot (the B-Story often overshadows the A-story). While Jody is a strong female character in a rare position of power, her role in the director’s chair inherently leaves her passive on the sidelines. It all builds to an action climax that lingers a little too long — after the bad guy is exposed, there’s no need for a helicopter chase.

Either way, the end credits are a long overdue tribute to Hollywood stuntmen as if campaigning to create a new Oscar category. Granted, it’s not the first movie to deal with the topic: Peter O’Toole starred in the cinephile cult classic “The Stunt Man” (1980), while Quentin Tarantino cast Kurt Russell as a killer stunt driver in “Death Proof” (2007), then directed Brad Pitt to an Oscar as a stuntman in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019).

I doubt Gosling or Blunt will earn Oscar nominations for “The Fall Guy,” which only underscores how rare it was for them to both earn nods for “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” It’s impossible for Hollywood to recreate a phenomenon so organic as “Barbenheimer.” Plucking two stars from those movies doesn’t mean that audiences will automatically go see it. Was the I.P. too outdated? Did the title’s double meaning fly over people’s heads?

Who knows why it’s underperforming at the box office, especially after such a marketing blitz, but don’t let that stop you from going to see it. It’s still the No. 1 movie in America right now and I guarantee you’ll have a blast watching such explosive stunt casting. Good luck getting Kiss’ “I Was Made for Loving You” out of your brain.

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Hailed by The Washington Post for “his savantlike ability to name every Best Picture winner in history," Jason Fraley began at WTOP as Morning Drive Writer in 2008, film critic in 2011 and Entertainment Editor in 2014, providing daily arts coverage on-air and online.

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Even With Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, The Fall Guy Failed Where One Underrated 2024 Horror Movie Succeeded at Box Office

T he 2024 summer movie season has seen its fair share of surprises at the box office with highly anticipated projects like The Fall Guy, Challengers , and underrated films like Cocorico and Tarot . However, despite the buzz, not all films managed to witness global success. Take, for example, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s star-studded The Fall Guy, which unfortunately failed to multiply it’s box office collection, despite initial hype.

Meanwhile, the underrated horror flick Tarot  managed to make quite the impression at the global box office. Therefore, comparing the budget of the films and the money spent on marketing, The Fall Guy and Tarot showcased stark contrast in the fortune they made following their global run.

Miserable Box Office Collection of Ryan Gosling’s The Fall Guy

The globally hyped action-thriller directed by David Leitch, The Fall Guy , starring an impressive cast including Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt saw a lackluster $27.7M during its opening weekend via The Numbers . But unfortunately, through the second weekend, the movie began noticing clear indications of its poor reception , as it witnessed a 51% drop to $13.7M.

“It was actually something I debated”: The Fall Guy Writer Almost Did the Unthinkable With Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible That Would Have Made Fans Hate Him Forever

Despite creating hype with its marketing and using Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s star power, The Fall Guy failed to earn the expected revenue, resulting in a disappointing box office performance. Narrating the tale of a stunt man who gets drawn into the criminal underworld, although the film began with a solid success, David Leitch’s action-thriller gradually began witnessing a downfall .

Created with an estimated production budget of $140M, The Fall Guy will need to earn somewhere between $310-350M to achieve some level of profit. But as of now, the film has simply managed to cross the 100 million milestone, with its worldwide gross of $104M.

However, looking on the bright side, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt ’s film is aiming to end its theatrical run earning $160M-$180M globally, via The Hollywood Handle .

Underrated Horror Flick Tarot Defied Box Office Expectations

Meanwhile, as The Fall Guy begins to underperform, considering its significant marketing budget and the caliber of its leads; a 2024 horror movie defied expectations. Marking stark contrasting fortunes between the star-studded action-thriller and the underrated horror flick Tarot, the 2024 summer blockbuster offered a startling turn of events.

One of the Most Inventively Horrifying Movies Currently in Theaters Happened as Director Kept Seeing Her Friends Turn to Astrology During the Pandemic

On one hand, as David Leitch’s action-thriller failed to leave its mark at the box office, the low-budget horror film Tarot , on the other hand, emerged as a dark horse. Made on a shoestring budget of approximately $8M as per Variety , the movie already made 2.5 times its production by pulling in a whopping $20M globally. Earning around $12M domestically, Tarot’ s success came as a stunning report, especially after its lukewarm reviews.

Nonetheless, witnessing the disparity in The Fall Guy as well as Tarot ‘s box office performance, it can be said with certainty that star power can no longer guarantee success. Unique storylines and well-executed scenes must resonate with audiences to generate a proper box office collection.

The Fall Guy and Tarot are currently running in theatres worldwide. 

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In 'The Fall Guy,' stunts finally get the spotlight

Mandalit del Barco

Ryan Gosling plays stunt man Colt Seavers in the new movie The Fall Guy , a new take on the 1980s TV show. Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures hide caption

Ryan Gosling plays stunt man Colt Seavers in the new movie The Fall Guy , a new take on the 1980s TV show.

At the Hollywood premiere of the new movie The Fall Guy, motorcyclists popped wheelies along the red carpet, one stuntman took a dive off a 45-foot crane outside the Dolby Theater, and Ryan Gosling's stunt doubles were ripped backwards through a movie poster. Three performers smashed through a window for a lively staged fight scene .

The movie's storyline and its massive global marketing campaign are all about giving credit to Hollywood's behind-the-scenes action stars. In every appearance, Gosling lavishes praise, noting he's had a stunt double since his 1990's TV show Young Hercules .

"I kind of had a stunt double my whole life," he explained at the premiere at South By Southwest. "It's always been this strange dynamic where they come and do all the cool stuff and then they go and hide, and you pretend that you did it. And it's not cool...it's about time that we recognize that they've been making actors into movie stars for a century."

A stunt performer at the Los Angeles premiere of The Fall Guy. Outside the Dolby Theatre, another stunt artist jumped from atop a 45-foot crane, while others showed off a staged fight scene. Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A stunt performer at the Los Angeles premiere of The Fall Guy. Outside the Dolby Theatre, another stunt artist jumped from atop a 45-foot crane, while others showed off a staged fight scene.

The Fall Guy is an action movie within an action movie: In the film, Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a stunt man trying to win back his film director ex, played by Emily Blunt. When the movie star for whom he doubles goes missing, Seavers is sent on a mission to find him.

Gosling did a few of his own stunts for the movie, including falling backwards 12 stories from a building. He did a fight scene inside a garbage bin spinning through the streets, and he surfed on a metal plate dragged by a truck on the Sydney Harbour bridge.

But Gosling's stunt doubles did even more daring tricks.

Movie Reviews

Ryan gosling is 'the fall guy' in this cheerfully nonsensical stuntman thriller.

"I got pulled back maybe 20 feet into a massive rock while on fire," recalls Ben Jenkin, a parkour specialist who stood in for Gosling's character as he was set on fire over and over. "I did the 'fire burn' eight times in one day. That was actually one of the ones that hurt the least."

Throughout production, Jenkin took more than a few punches.

"The car hit wasn't fun," he told NPR. "I mean, it was fun to do, but the pain! It definitely hurt my leg a little bit when I smashed through the front windshield and landed on the road. That was a thumper. You watch the movie and you see the stunts and you're like, 'Oh my god, that's crazy. That must have hurt.' But you don't see the prep that went into it."

The new movie The Fall Guy is an update of the 1980's action TV show of the same name starring Lee Majors, shown here in 1981. Majors makes a cameo in the new movie. Walt Disney Television Photo Archives/Getty Images hide caption

The new movie The Fall Guy is an update of the 1980's action TV show of the same name starring Lee Majors, shown here in 1981. Majors makes a cameo in the new movie.

Pulling back the curtain on stunts

The movie was directed by former stuntman David Leitch, who spent 20 years doubling for A-list actors like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon before making such action films as Atomic Blonde, Bullet Train, John Wick and a Fast and Furious spinoff.

For The Fall Guy , Leitch says he wanted all the stunts to be old school and practical — using real people, not AI or CGI.

"We did high falls out of helicopters. We lit people on fire multiple times," Leitch told NPR. "Cars flipping, crashing, fight scenes, bottles broken. A lot of stunts. We really put everything into it. Honestly, we knew we had to make sure we did right by the stunt community."

Posing as Gosling's character in the movie, aerialist Troy Brown took a backwards 150-foot fall out of a helicopter to land onto the same airbag his legendary stuntman father Bob Brown once landed on for a movie.

Stunt driver Logan Holladay jumped a truck over a 225 foot-wide canyon. And for another scene, he broke a Guinness World Record. Driving 80 miles per hour on a wet, sandy Australian beach, Holladay maneuvered a modified Jeep Grand Cherokee. A blast from an air cannon under the SUV propelled it to roll over itself eight and a half times. (The previous record for cannon rolls in a car was seven, held by Adam Kirley for the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale.)

Ryan Gosling, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ben Jenkin, Logan Holladay, and Justin Eaton, along with director David Leitch on set. Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures hide caption

Ryan Gosling, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ben Jenkin, Logan Holladay, and Justin Eaton, along with director David Leitch on set.

"Logan gets out of the car and gives us the thumbs up, and we know he's okay," recalls the movie's stunt designer, Chris O'Hara. He and his team had carefully calculated the density of the sand and the speed.

"It's definitely a science," he told NPR. "It's not just, you know, go crash a car; We're really doing our due diligence to make it the perception of danger while eliminating all the risks so that in the end, we can make something super exciting."

David Leitch says all of the stunts in the movie are also there to serve the story. "There's a lot of math, there's a lot of physics, there's a lot of physicality and performance," he says. "But there's also this artistic design and creativity. Like, how is this sequence going to move the character forward? How is this sequence going to be more fun? How are we going to make them laugh? How are we going to make them be scared?"

Emily Blunt plays Judy Moreno in The Fall Guy. Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures hide caption

Emily Blunt plays Judy Moreno in The Fall Guy.

Campaigning for an Oscars category

Unlike costume designers, hair and makeup designers, and soon, casting directors, the Academy Awards have never had a category for stunts. But The Fall Guy stars Gosling and Blunt made a pitch for one at this year's Oscars ceremony.

"To the stunt performers and the stunt coordinators who help make movies magic," Gosling said onstage, "we salute you."

That support is appreciated by stunt performers like Michelle Lee, who doubles for Rosario Dawson in the Star Wars spinoff series Ahsoka . She hopes this effort helps people understand discipline and sacrifices stunt performers make to entertain audiences. "Sometimes, you pad up and you're like, 'Oh, this one's going to hurt,' but this is what I'm here for and I've practiced," she says. "You know, pain is temporary, film is forever. You have that cool shot forever."

Mike Chat and Neraida Bega train Hollywood stunt performers at a center run by 87 North, the production company run by The Fall Guy director David Leitch and his producer wife Kelly McCormick. They say that for years, stunt performers have campaigned for the Academy to honor their work.

"People have petitioned, they've gone out and picketed," says Chat. But that didn't work, says Bega.

"The fear was that people were going to make the stunts more dangerous and bigger and bigger for them to win. But that is not the goal," Bega says. "There is so much discipline, they work so hard and they have to be always ready."

Chat has been in the business for more than 20 years. He and others hope The Fall Guy may finally convince the Academy to award an Oscar for best stunts.

"They have taken the initiative to say, 'OK, we're going to educate you, we're going to earn it, we're gonna prove it and show you why it's deserved.'"

And for that effort, he says the stunt community around the world is giving The Fall Guy a big thumbs up.

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A Quiet Place 2-Movie Collection

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Product Description

If they hear you, they hunt you! Silence is survival in these two terrifyingly suspenseful thrillers. Follow the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) as they face the terror of mysterious creatures that hunt by sound.

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.73 x 5.31 x 0.47 inches; 2.89 ounces
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ 4K
• Release date ‏ : ‎ September 6, 2022
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Emily Blunt, John Krasinsky, Millicent Simmonds
• Dubbed: ‏ : ‎ French, Spanish, Portuguese
• Studio ‏ : ‎ PARAMOUNT
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B3K8HTLR
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2
• #51 in Mystery & Thrillers (Movies & TV)
• #78 in Horror (Movies & TV)
• #226 in Action & Adventure Blu-ray Discs

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