Emily (2022) dir Frances O'Connor
Emma Mackey stars as the Victorian, Yorkshire, author Emily Bronte in a partly fictional story of her short adult life. She only wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights, before she died aged 30 from something like tuberculosis. Her sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Anne (Amelia Gething) were also published novelists. They live with their father (Adrian Dunbar), who was the village priest, brother Branwell (Fion Whitehead), and Aunt (Gemma Jones), their mother having died some years earlier. This story portrays Emily as being a trailblazer, a woman author in a very male dominated world, who led the way for her sisters to follow (which is not quite the order things actually happened in). But that is fine, it does not claim to be history. It's historical fiction. Mackey is very good in the lead role. The only other thing I have seen her in is Netflix's s*x Education and I wouldn't have pictured her as Emily Bronte based on that, but she is perfect in this. She really does a great job of portraying a very intelligent but troubled woman, who refuses to confirm to what society expects her to be, writing a novel that was controversial, depicting domestic abuse and challenging the traditional ideas of Victorian morals. She is portrayed as very uncomfortable around strangers, preferring her own company and escaping into a fantasy world. She has an affair with the church curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Those aspects of the plot are also fictional, as far as I am aware. William actually married her sister Anne. But who is to say what else might have happened before that? It's a very good story, quite bleak at times, just like Wuthering Heights, and there are some similarities between the Emily-William relationship and that of Kathy-Heathcliffe in the novel, though without the violence.
8 / 10
Before I Go To Sleep (2014) dir Rowan Joffe
A somewhat lacklustre psychological thriller with a very good, and I would say wasted cast. It stars Nicole Kidman as Christine, and 40 yr old English woman who wakes every day with no recollection of what happened the day before nor anything from the last 14 years or so. This is due to a traumatic event coupled with a serious head injury that happened 10 years earlier. Colin Firth plays her husband, Ben, who every morning has to explain this to her, helped by various sticky notes and photos left around their house. Mark Strong plays the neurologist treating her and Anne-Marie Duff here best friend. The neurologist is trying a new treatment, that over the course of the couple of weeks the film spans seems to make an improvement and Christine starts to remember things from her past as well as holding on to some recent memories. What she starts to remember does not exactly match she is being told by Ben. He is able to explain why; that some memories have come back before and caused more trauma and stress, and that he too finds this all very difficult, naturally, so for his own sanity he has to be economical with the truth sometimes. But then as the story unfolds there are clear contradictions between what the various others characters are telling or not telling Christine, especially with respect to the incident that triggered all this; why did it happen? was it an accident or was she attacked? This is all exactly what you expect from a thriller film of course. It's not that original a premise, think of Memento for example. That does not matter, if its done well, but this just seems not that good a script. Some of the lines sound a bit banal and I was left wondering why it had such high-profile cast members. In fact at the end there is a scene with unknown (to me) actor, and he actually seems better than all the rest of them, because it just has the feel of a low budget film that you would expect a cast of unknowns to be in. And if it had been that I would probably have liked it more. When the inevitable big twist came, it was something I had seen coming from early on. The music is fairly lame too and felt like the sort of thing you would get in a made-for-daytime-TV movie. There's nothing really wrong with it, just nothing noteworthy for me.
5 / 10
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