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.
