Cinema - all a bit underwhelming as Emily gets her heights wuthered

Frances O'Connor’s tale of how Emily got her heights wuthered just about manages to convince in the end.

An awful lot of it is rather underwhelming and actually just a bit dull, but what shines through – and what remains in the end – is a superb central performance from Franco-British star Emma Mackey as the darkly mysterious Emily, the odd fish in a rather odd family. However the pace of it all is distinctly 19th century which is probably appropriate but doesn’t do the film many favours in 2022.

It’s clearly a passion piece for O'Connor who also wrote it, and she gives plenty of that passion to Emily, the “strange one” who feels very much apart from the family, the dark horse who would rather hide for three days when sister Charlotte has a friend round for a three-night sleepover. But you sense the burning flames within in, and they start to come forth when into their world walks the dashing new curate Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) – and that’s when she first smiles as he delivers a sermon about God being in the Yorkshire rain that has just soaked him.

At first it’s total antipathy between the two, but you know there’s only one way it’s heading – plenty of romping on the hilltops, the not so high-minded curate showing admirable patience in decorsetting young Emily. There is plenty of untying to do – just as there is when this curate’s egg of a man promptly decides that what he is doing is awfully ungodly after all.

Apparently if Weightman had anything going with any of the Brontes it was platonic and certainly not with Em, but in O'Connor’s reimaginging, it’s Emily he goes for, and boy, do they go for it, Weightman unleashing something that’s really not going to go back in the bottle (the implication being that this is her apprenticeship for writing Wuthering Heights).

Rather more interesting perhaps is Emily’s devotion to her bad-boy brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) as he inexorably and dissolutely heads towards his early grave. There is real tenderness between him and Emily, kindred spirits in a world where their excesses have no place.

You can’t help feeling a little sorry for Charlotte in all this, though. Alexandra Dowling plays her well enough, but the Charlotte she is given is a frosty pants and a bore. There’s also an unconsciously odd turn from Adrian Dunbar as the girls’ dad. Of course he is a fine actor, but he is also a distinctive actor, and it’s impossible not to hear Superintendent Hastings in his every line and intonation. I mean, why on earth would you get him to say “Let me ask the questions”. We’re right back Line of Duty territory.

And so too does Emma Mackey take a little bit of getting used to. She’s a younger Anne Hathaway all over, and once she opens her mouth she’s spookily Anne Hathaway from One Day. Slowly though she establishes herself as the rebel. We know this because she writes “Freedom in Speech” on her arm and shouts it from the hillside. But she is also the lover, and Mackey’s performance imbues her with something special.

Just a slight shame about the rest of it all – ponderous, occasionally slightly silly, very much back (rather than edge) of seat and well – horrible to say it – rather dull.