80
Emily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
Mackey convinces us that there are so many more colours to Emily than the ones she is allowed to display. Her thoughtful, understated performance matches a film that teases out the flesh-and-blood emotions from the stuff of gothic romance.
83
The Film Stage by Christopher Schobert
O’Connor, who also scripted, adroitly manages the feat of making a 19th-century period piece burst with contemporary feeling.
75
Even a movie as evocative and well-mounted as this one can’t help but feel like a shadow of a shadow. It traces the silhouette of “The Strange One” without ever achieving the emotionality it needs to feel her touch first-hand.
100
With Emily, Frances O’Connor has crafted a first film that feels like the work of an accomplished master.
80
O’Connor’s well-modulated debut doesn’t pretend to be a faithful recreation of the facts of the Brontës’ lives. Instead it succeeds on a much trickier level, giving us a psychologically vivid Emily who did not write “Wuthering Heights” because a real-life romance unlocked her passionate nature, but whom we’d love to imagine having had such a grand affair, because she was always the woman with “Wuthering Heights” inside her.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Lovia Gyarkye
With her angular face and penetrating gaze, Mackey commands the screen, confidently shepherding us through Emily’s mercurial moods. Her eyes — darting nervously at one moment, squinting suspiciously at another — tells us what dialogue can’t.