If you’re aware of the film Emily, the new biopic of writer Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, it’s probably because it’s doing surprisingly solid business for a modestly budgeted period piece and is being widely lauded by critics and delighted audience members. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times praises the film by saying approvingly that it “takes a frisky approach to its source material.”

Let’s just pause here to consider this statement. The film represents a “frisky approach” to the life of Emily Brontë. “Frisky.” FRISKY. If there’s one word that should never be applied to the searing, tragic, yet magnificent life of Emily Brontë — or, hell, any Brontë — it’s “frisky.”

But Dargis isn’t wrong in this descriptive term, because if you don’t know much of anything about Emily Brontë and you see this new film, you’ll get the impression she was an irreligious, sexy minx with fetchingly tousled hair who screwed her father’s cute curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in the barn after he’d counseled her to learn to love nature in order to endure her drab life in her father’s parsonage on the moors. You’ll also get the impression that Emily (Emma Mackey of Sex Education) was enabled to write the thunderous Gothic novel Wuthering Heights because of her hot, forbidden love life. That, plus her experiences running around the moors high on opiates with her wild brother Brandon (Fionn Whitehead of Dunkirk).