For years, our fascination with the Brontë family has outstripped virtually all others in the world of fiction. Partly because of their talent, partly because a familial link always brings fascination, but in large part because Emily Brontë wrote a novel so flooded with passion and tragedy, it refuses to go away.

Wuthering Heights may not appear until the closing minutes of Frances O’Connor’s profoundly moving directorial debut, but its spirit runs through it like a stick of rock. Any film depicting the life of an author about whom relatively little is known, has to seek clues in their output; O’Connor did just that, then handed it over to Emma Mackey to inhabit.

For the briefest of seconds, Mackey is Maeve from Sex Education dressed in a bonnet. But she soon strips that connection from our minds and replaces it with a depiction of Emily Brontë so complete that we feel every introverted yet curious and vulnerable yet strong-minded bone in her body. Brontë wrote of a love that ‘resembles the eternal rocks beneath’ between Cathy and Heathcliff, and that romantic knowledge had to come from somewhere. Here, it burns bright in a relationship between Emily and William Weightman, a curate working for her father in Haworth.

Historians may bluster about O’Connor’s use of poetic license, but true or not it seems inconceivable that anyone who hadn’t loved and lost so immeasurably could write Wuthering Heights. And the chemistry and heartbreak O’Connor elicits from Mackey and Oliver Jackson-Cohen grips your soul. The ensemble cast of Brontë family members feel real and rooted to the harsh Yorkshire landscape that both challenged and inspired them. And even Adrian Dunbar is understated as the family patriarch. In a year when too many films discard you at the edge of feeling, Emily draws you into a deep pool of longing, grief, love, lust and, ultimately, hope.

Emily is in cinemas from Friday 14 October.