‘Emily’ gives new life to the ‘strange’ Brontë sis

That name on the book cover is our first warning bell.

Only two minutes into “Emily,” a bold and audacious retelling of Emily Brontë's life starring an uncommonly compelling Emma Mackey, we spy freshly bound volumes of “Wuthering Heights,” her only novel and life's achievement.

“By Emily Brontë,” the cover says. But Brontë fans and even some casual readers will know that Emily, like her sisters Charlotte and Anne, published at first under a male pseudonym, in her case Ellis Bell. It was both a bid for privacy and a concession to a Victorian society in which a female author could hardly expect to garner the same respect and deference accorded her male counterparts.

This change is the first — but not the most important — way in which writer-director Frances O'Connor, in a hugely impressive debut feature, reimagines the life of the “strange” Brontë, who died at 30, unable to give the world more novels and poems. Most brazenly, O'Connor gives Emily a love affair — fiery, forbidden and ultimately tragic — with turbulent passion unfolding on the windswept Yorkshire moors.

The film poses a basic question: How did a sheltered young woman, a reverend's daughter in the small village of Haworth, come up with the emotional bandwidth to create “Wuthering Heights?” It's a question asked out loud by older sister Charlotte, who loves but is also violently jealous of her sister. “There's something you're hiding from me,” Charlotte says, demanding to know the inspiration of what she calls an “ugly” book. Emily, meanwhile, is deathly ill. She still manages a crafty smile.

We now flash back to earlier years. Emily, despite her dark and brooding beauty, is a quiet soul, “the strange one” in Charlotte's unkind words and an “odd fish” by her own description. Charlotte, the more socially and conventionally successful sister, thrives at school, where she is offered a teaching post. Emily tries to join her and fails spectacularly, suffering homesickness and soon returning home. “Is there something wrong with me?” she asks her brother, Branwell.

Luckily we get to look long and and hard at this Emily, brought provocatively to life by O'Connor and her star. Strange or not, it's hard to look away.

Michael Wharley / Associated Press This image released by Bleecker Street Films shows Emma Mackey in “Emily.”