One evening, near the start of “A Quiet Passion,” the Dickinsons of Amherst sit in the parlor. The hour is late. We look at Emily (Emma Bell), and the camera begins a patient rotation, through three hundred and sixty degrees, noting each family member in turn: stern Aunt Elizabeth (Annette Badland), half nodding off to sleep; Emily’s bewhiskered father, Edward (Keith Carradine), reading; her brother, Austin (Benjamin Wainwright), also reading, in a recess of the shadows; her adored sister, Lavinia (Rose Williams), known as Vinnie, sewing; and their mother, another Emily (Joanna Bacon), who gazes at the fire. We pass the flames in the hearth, a candelabra, a decanter and a wine glass, and a vase of flowers, before coming to rest once more on young Emily, her features now furrowed by some unspoken dismay.

In the hands of Terence Davies, the writer and director of “A Quiet Passion,” this circling movement becomes a thing of beauty, because it tells the time. While the camera turns, we hear the tick of a clock, as if the two mechanisms were interlinked; then comes a chime, and with it a sense of the pace at which the characters conduct their lives. Do the days crawl by in torment, or is it our own eventful haste that would strike the Dickinsons as unendurable? Were they more at leisure, perhaps, to let the past wash over the present—to lay themselves at the mercy of regret? The eyes of Mrs. Dickinson mist with tears, at the fireside, and she asks Emily for “one of the old hymn tunes.” Her dutiful daughter sits at the piano and plays “Abide with Me.”

Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886, and the film runs from her schooling to her open grave. If you are wondering how Davies marks the impact of age, and are bracing yourself for geological layers of makeup, fear not. Special effects do the trick. Staring straight at us, Wainwright, as Austin, makes way for Duncan Duff; Williams, as Vinnie, becomes Jennifer Ehle; and Bell, as Emily, turns into Cynthia Nixon, who will carry the rest of the movie. In each case, the face is transformed by a kind of gentle suffusion. Better still, it’s part of a visual joke, because the Dickinsons are sitting for a photographer, who is taking portraits with his cumbersome plate-glass camera. The slow motion of years goes by in a single exposure.

Dickinson’s existence, and what sprang from its apparent sparseness, is an enduring object of fascination. Long before her poems found a global audience, her immediate neighbors grew curious. One resident of Amherst, newly arrived in 1881, told of “a lady whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years.” Enticing details were added: “She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her.” Her best biographer, Richard B. Sewall, unpicked this legend in his 1974 study, from which a worldlier and more socialized figure emerged. To an extent, Davies follows Sewall’s lead, giving the heroine a friend*,* Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), whose effervescent heresy gives Emily cause for delight. Girded in full skirts, the two women deal in quips. “Let’s not be anything today except superficial,” Emily says, as they enter a commencement ball. “Yes, and superficiality should always be spontaneous. If it is studied, it is too close to hypocrisy,” Vryling replies.

Sequences like this are the lightest portions of the film, and the least satisfying. You get the slightly starched impression that the characters could be actors, mounting an Amherst production of a lesser-known play by Oscar Wilde. To be fair, “A Quiet Passion” is wittier, in its early stretches, than anyone might have foreseen, but it’s when the door closes, and the Dickinsons are alone with their trepidations, that the movie draws near to its rightful severity. When news comes that Fort Sumter has been fired upon, Austin declares his intention to enlist, only to be thwarted by his father, who will not countenance the loss of a son. How strange it is to hear such protective love expressed in a voice of thunder, and how typically discreet of Davies not to risk the reconstruction of a battle but, instead, to show period photographs of Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, and Antietam, with tallies of the wounded and the dead.

Like Dickinson, the film itself gradually withdraws. We never see a street or a shop. A youthful visit to the opera, in Boston, is succeeded by summery gardens, by interiors and ailments—the adult Emily is diagnosed with Bright’s disease—and finally by two deaths, one in the wake of another. (It’s amazing how the deathbed scene, a staple of fiction and painting in Dickinson’s era, has all but vanished from cinema, the last great gasp being Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers,” in 1972. Moviegoers wanting mortality today must get it in short and savage doses.) Most stricken of all is a nocturnal talk between Emily, who is permitted by her father to write between midnight and three in the morning, and Susan (Jodhi May), Austin’s unhappy wife. “You have your poetry,” she says. “You have a life,” Emily responds, although Susan’s woe suggests that it is not a life worth envying. I have revered May since “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992), when she faced down her Huron pursuers and stepped serenely off a cliff, and here, as Susan, she lends force to the gathering gloom.

At the other extreme is Ehle, who achieves the near-impossible, somehow convincing us, in her strong smiles, that there is moral lustre, rather than pale pliability, in Vinnie’s luminous goodwill. The worst that she can think to say of Mabel Loomis Todd (Noémie Schellens)—Austin’s flirtatious mistress, and, though nobody watching “A Quiet Passion” will believe it, one of the first editors of Dickinson’s verse—is “I once hoped that Mabel would go up in a balloon and then explode.” Emily laughs at such innocence, and readers will recall her own riotous stanza about a falling hot-air balloon:

The Gilded Creature strains—and spins— Trips frantic in a Tree— Tears open her imperial Veins— And tumbles in the Sea—

That strain of surreal violence is never suppressed for long in her work, especially in some of her startling beginnings: “If ever the lid gets off my head / And lets the brain away.” It is not a strain, however, to which Davies pays much heed, and the poetry that we hear in his movie, recited in Nixon’s voiceover, is of a wry tranquillity, concluding, as one might predict, with “Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.” The film, in tune with its title, is rich in emotional tact, and plangent to a fault; such harshness as it can muster is supplied by the redoubtable Nixon. What makes her performance unusual, and even, at times, unpalatable, is how few pains she takes to sweeten the woman whom she plays. Watch her lurk upstairs, denying visitors a glimpse of the fabled recluse, or shudder uncontrollably in the throes of illness, as if prey to her own private earthquake. By seeming so mean and ungracious or coarsened by physical hurt, she scrapes against the grain of the movie’s decorum, and asks, What kind of soul did you expect, at the root of poems like these?

Because I could not stop for Vin—He would not stop for me—But drove his Dodge straight at the hoodOf my—Infiniti—

The Fast—& Furious—has reachedInstallment number Eight—In which the vital word of FastHas been replaced by—Fate—

A Diesel going Rogue—alas—Has left his Friends in shock—He even swings a Wrecking Ball—In vain—to crush the Rock—

The Villain is Charlize Theron—Who makes the Streets explode—Yet she was more a bomb-ass BitchIn Mad Max—Fury Road—

The Stunts that gild the Franchise areThe sickest ever seen—The modes of Transport now includeA—fucking—Submarine

You feel—however—that the GuysAre racing Lamborghinis—To sublimate a swelling wishTo wave around their—Weenies— ♦

An earlier version of this piece identified Buffam as an invented character. A real woman named Vryling Buffum appears in a footnote in Richard B. Sewall’s Emily Dickinson biography, as a friend of her sister Lavinia.