Emma.

The eager new film of Jane Austen’s Emma, directed by Autumn de Wilde, puts a period at the end of the title, like so: Emma. The intent according to de Wilde is to cheekily remind the audience that they are watching a “period” film, but we need hardly be reminded since Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) and the other characters are lavishly costumed (by Alexandra Byrne, an Oscar winner for Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and put into precisely designed settings. Emma. is a film worth looking at thanks to its craftspeople, but it is less immediately clear that it is a film that offers much to feel. De Wilde uses the beauty of the locations to a kind of lulling effect, and the mostly well-intentioned maneuvering that Taylor-Joy’s Emma does to position the people in her life the way she wants them isn’t always as sharp or funny as it might be in a film that uses choral singing of hymns on the soundtrack. (There is well-chosen music within the story, but I confess I’m baffled by the songs de Wilde chooses to add as score.) When Emma. reached its turning point and it appears that young Miss Woodhouse may have taken things a step too far the energy changes, and we see Emma as a young woman much more complicated than the precocious matchmaker we have come to know.

Anya Taylor-Joy’s face suggests great self-awareness, and as Emma she navigates through a series of social interactions with appropriately varied levels of finesse. Emma is doting with her father (Bill Nighy), by turns bold and retiring with neighbor Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), and an eager mentor with her new friend Harriet Smith (Mia Goth in the film’s most ebullient performance). It is with Harriet that Emma begins to confuse her own feelings with her desire for an ordered world with near disastrous consequences. Goth – who plays the lower in station Harriet as actively enjoying her friendship with the wealthier Emma – make an ideal foil, especially after Emma misunderstands Harriet’s feelings for the dashing Frank Churchill (Callum Turner). A social blunder brings Emma’s standing with her friends and neighbors into question, and my favorite shot in the film occurs at this point. Emma is seated in an open carriage after a friend has expressed their disappointment in her. She gives a word to driver and the carriage begins to move, but the effect is of the world moving around her. Up to now we have seen Emma almost exclusively in social settings – there is a very specific dynamic at work even in scenes just between Emma and Harriet – but now we go beneath the shell and see Emma’s uncertainty.

Emma. doesn’t go out of its way to comment on our own cultural moment, except for the odd choice of multiple shots of Harriet’s red-clad schoolmates walking in formation around the countryside. (Did de Wilde mean to evoke The Handmaid’s Tale?) A story of women fighting for emotional space in a world which views them as accessories to the social order will never go out of style, though. Period.