At The Movies: Period romance Emily, absurdist comedy White Noise worth your while

EMILY (M18)

131 minutes, opens on Thursday

4 stars

The story: In 19th-century Northern England, Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte (Emma Mackey) chafes against the expectations of her widowed vicar father (Adrian Dunbar). She yearns for freedom, running in the moorland – and rolling in the hay with sexy new curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who is captivated by her independence in spite of himself.

There is no record of Weightman committing carnal acts with English novelist Bronte, and barely any of Bronte herself. She was known to be a recluse.

But what a boring movie Emily would be otherwise – and how could a girl so sheltered conceive a rapturous literary masterpiece like Wuthering Heights (1847) before her death in 1848 at age 30?

British star-in-the-making Mackey is restless with emotional turbulence beneath her sullenness – there is a mystery to her Emily. The speculative biopic is an assured directing-writing debut by British-Australian actress Frances O’Connor (Mansfield Park, 1999) that marries life and literature, as well as family drama and gothic romance, to imagine the subject’s interior life.

Emily’s nurturing yet rivalrous relationships with her wordsmith sisters – Jane Eyre creator Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) and Agnes Grey writer Anne (Amelia Gething) – were an influence. Their novels were published alongside Wuthering Heights in 1847.

Debauched brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) is, however, the love of Emily’s life. He and Weightman, of course. The movie suggests that Wuthering Heights was inspired by the pain of losing them both and of her consuming affair.

And it boldly channels all of the book’s beauty, sensitivity and tortured passion back into the tragic central love story with those eternal Yorkshire moors as overcast as Emily’s troubled brow.

Hot take: This rainswept period romance is fervent and sensuous, as if scripted by Emily Bronte herself.

WHITE NOISE (NC16)

136 minutes, on Netflix

3 stars

The story: An American family reckons with death, grocery shopping and a public health calamity (not necessarily Covid-19) in this absurdist comedy.

White Noise is a Noah Baumbach adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 post-modern masterwork, centring on a neurotic family who would be a comfortable fit in the writer-director’s The Squid And The Whale (2005) and Greenberg (2010).

Adam Driver from Baumbach’s Oscar-nominated Marriage Story (2019) plays paunchy, pretentious professor Jack Gladney opposite Greta Gerwig as his wife Babette. The couple share four children from previous marriages and a fear of dying.

Their everyday contentment in a 1984 Midwest town, along with ritual trips to the supermarket, is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a toxic cloud.

Life resumes after nine days of evacuation and quarantine, but nothing is the same. Jack’s exposure to the contamination has brought to the fore his anxieties about death. And what are those pills Babette is secretly popping?

Do not fault Baumbach for the erratic tone, whiplashing from domestic farce to dystopian doom. He is being true to the book.

Here, too, are the novel’s overlapping chatter, which the actors deliver with deadpan aplomb, and the background din of televisions – all this static to quiet the existential dread.

The movie is garrulous and arch. It can test a viewer’s patience, but it is a constant surprise of the madcap and the cerebral. A 38-year-old satire has somehow become a story for the post-pandemic present day of mass-media white noise – one that remains optimistic as it returns the entire cast to the shiny supermarket for a joyous, life-affirming end-credit dance video.

Hot take: Who knew the terrifying prospect of mortality could be so wacky?