I felt a funeral in my brain
And mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through
– Emily Dickinson

Terence Davies did not use this poem in his movie.

Part of me is bewildered by life because of the fact I’m not him, he is not me, so the movie I created in my head looks nothing like the movie I just saw on a big screen in a cinema in Amsterdam.

Terence Davies pictures Emily Dickinson as a rebellious, autonomous, young girl who transforms into a lonely, bitter, disillusioned, afraid and rather irritating woman, who shuts people out and locks herself into her room. I like this. Yet I don’t feel it. I look at it.

Disappointment with a movie reveals nothing about the movie. And if you talk about it afterwards, like we did (it’s one of the reasons to see a movie together), you tend to keep on talking about the movie you didn’t see instead of the one you just saw.

Based on letters, poems and books I thought Emily was in love with Susan. In the movie she is not. So you wait and wait and wait. There is one little scene. Call it maybe.

Sounds. Light. Wood. Clothes. Meticulous, mercurial, witty language. All very beautiful. Loud.

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy
– Emily Dickinson

»