Frances O’Connor’s bodice ripping, corset stripping, crinoline crunching smorgasbord of strange Gothic goings on, up on the Yorkshire moors, is currently showing on Sky movies. Frances O’Connor is an actress (turned writer/director) who I very much liked some twenty odd years ago, appearing in Bedazzled, the Brendan Fraser re-make of Peter Cook and Dudley’s Moore’s Bedazzled, and Mansfield Park, amongst others.  At 56, Ms O’Connor appears to have aged not a jot.

Emily re-visits the ever popular (well, amongst those who can still be bothered with Victorian literature) and ever intriguing Bronte family.  Why intriguing?  Because very little is known about the insular siblings (especially enigmatic Emily); to the point that some readers question who wrote the great Wuthering Heights.  Did Anne write WH and pass it off as nutter Emily’s deranged creation?  Or did Branwell write WH, whilst off his head on opium, and Emily nicked the manuscript while her feckless brother lay zoned out on their parsonage couch?  Unlikely. He craved fame and would have made sure his name took centre stage.  Heck – could the parsonage housekeeper have written WH, taking her inspiration from the bonkers Bronte family.

It doesn’t matter that the Bronte clan remain an elusive mystery, in fact it’s a positive bonus to film makers because they can simply go ahead and make it all up!  Which is what Frances O’Connor did, proving that fantasy is almost always an improvement on boring old reality.  I’m inclined to think however that, in making stuff up, Frances got pretty close to how things chez Bronte may actually have been.  And besides, she clearly did some serious research, allowing her to speculate in a fashion that verges on the wholly believable.

Of course, the affair with William Weightman (who really existed) the sexy, brooding curate cum tutor, is just wishful thinking, but an effective device to turn Emily’s solitary existence into something worth putting on film.  There is also a clear parallel drawn between Cathy and Heathcliffe’s relationship and that of Emily and Branwell. This works really well, as E and B scamper about the moors and ‘roll and fall in green’ (you can almost see Kate Bush cavorting on the hills behind them) and spend their evenings peering into a neighbour’s house and slagging off said neighbours, just as C and H did. We also get the suggestion of a somewhat incestuous relationship (some weirdness with a bedroom sheet hanging on the line) between the two, as Branwell becomes more possessive and increasingly jealous of Emily’s relationship with her hunky tutor.  Totally plausible given the claustrophobic nature of the Bronte household.

Ms O’Connor gives Branwell a major role in Emily, played brilliantly by Fionn Whitehead.  Branwell is often dismissed as a sad, drugged up failure; much the lesser talent of the Bronte clan but, here, he shines.  This fictional Branwell is Emily’s comrade in arms. Her twin soul. Her Heathcliffe.  Whitehead plays him as charismatic, playful, engaging, before he starts to really plumb the depths of Victorian hypocritical society. Where Weightman tutors Emily in the ways of the French (Oh how I loved all the French bits) Godliness, and forbidden fornication, Branwell tutors her in the ways of rolling a cigarette and smoking it like you’re Clint Eastwood; of getting a (probably pen and ink) tattoo; of getting hammered down the local pub and exploring the pupil dilating, sensation enhancing effects of opium – a drug most Victorians were familiar with. Given the Brontes’ ages when they churned out their literary masterpieces, this louche student’ish behaviour doesn’t seem too far off the mark. 

If you’re steeped in Gothic fiction (as I am) then the Mask scene would have made your Gothic cup runneth over.  This particular fiction is based on strange fact, for Patrick Bronte would ask his children, when they were but little tikes, to wear a mask believing that this would remove their inhibitions. He would then line them up and ask them questions, hoping that the mask would reveal their true feelings.  What an inspired choice of Frances O’Connor’s to have her adult Emily wear a quite beautiful mask, in a weird Victorian parlour game, and evoke the spirit of their dead mother, whilst everyone sits in the spooky dark, the wind moaning, the windows rattling, as though Cathy herself is pleading to be let in, only this time the spook is Maria Branwell, on her way out.

The hand-held, slightly shaky camera work lends itself to this film. The ‘up in your face’ shots. The not following Emily and Branwell as they went ‘running up that hill’ (I heard Kate again) into the distance.  The camera, again miles away from E and B, as they stand atop a cliff – two doomed silhouettes in the distance.  But then, most everyone was doomed back in the 1840s (and a good deal later too.)  If cholera didn’t get you, then Typhus did, or TB, or smallpox, or the third plague.  We moan about the NHS. The NHS moans about the NHS and yet how lucky we all are.  Patrick Bronte lost all six children to diseases now entirely preventable. And I looked up William Weightman, only to find he died, at the tender age of 28, from Cholera after visiting a sick parishioner.  I swear I felt a slight chill, as if I’d known the man!  Poor William I kept thinking.  Poor everybody living in the Victorian age.

And what a soundtrack Emily has. Dancing violins, hammering pianos and powerful cellos. And what scenery. My favourite kind, up on the Yorkshire moors with its stone houses and drystone walls and wind-blown trees.  It was a good choice to not use the parsonage at Haworth, as the family home, but instead have your location scout seek out a much more isolated, suitably Gothic edifice out in the northern hills.

The film works because it manages to give a version of the Brontes which is relatable, ‘real’ and often darkly humorous.  It doesn’t seem to matter at all that almost none of it will bear any resemblance to the reality of the Bronte’s lives or come close to the truth of how a young woman with severe anxiety, and people issues, managed to write a Gothic classic.

Maybe that’s the Brontes’ other genius gift.  Why not keep your adoring readers eternally guessing?