It does not take long into Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s English lit classic, for one to detect the film-maker’s true faith. It is not to the challenging and beloved gothic novel of emotional repression and inheritance; as with many other cinematic adaptations, Fennell dispenses with the unruly latter half of the book, along with most of its conventions. In Fennell’s emphatically maximalist vision – she has explained that the quotation marks in the film’s marketing are a note of humility, to her singular and limited interpretation – the tortuously connected Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) swoon about the Yorkshire moors in extravagant, anachronistic formalwear, flagrantly unbound by period decorum.
Over three features, the English writer-director has demonstrated a penchant for sticky visuals; arguably the most-discussed scene from 2023’s Saltburn, her discourse-driving sophomore feature, involved the licking of cummy bathwater from the drain. Wuthering Heights is not to be controversially out-soaked. In closeup, sweat beads and drips down a spine; snail slime indolently streaks a window; freshly poured pig blood mucks Cathy’s dress. Desire, less suggested than enforced, stains everything. Early in the film, just after the abrupt ageing of Cathy and Heathcliff from boundless children (played by Charlotte Mellington and Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) to unspecific adults, Elordi’s brooding, beastly Heathcliff catches Robbie’s blonde Cathy, furiously horny after a bit of light voyeurism, pleasuring herself against the windswept rocks. She tries to hide her hand in her dress; he picks her up by the bodice strings, and licks her fingers clean.
Erotic mileage for this will vary, as it does with any Fennell project; the director’s compulsion to induce shock by whatever loud, luxe means necessary has proven reliably divisive, though her bankable notoriety seems perhaps more polarizing than her actual work, which undeniably speaks to our vibes-forward, hit-seeking visual culture. I met this brazen play for the lizard brain as I did much of the callowly shocking Saltburn, with part jolt, part admiration – in this sexless slop age, at least someone is trying! – and an eye roll. There is visual pleasure, of course, in seeing two beautiful people contort themselves into postures of florid desire, the titillation of fingers and mouths and skin.
But this lustful vibe felt curiously muted and chilly, and not because of the persistent Yorkshire mist. We have only just met the adult pair, with no sense of their intervening years. Robbie, a mature actor in her mid-30s, plays Cathy, who is 15 on the page, as if she has just discovered sexual pleasure. Wide-eyed and petulant, naive and yet fully formed, she is an uncanny mix of woman and girl, without much history. Like, say, a life-size doll … and that’s before Cathy plays literal dollhouse in the ostentatious wealth afforded by her marriage (to Shazad Latif’s Mr Linton), a loveless, baroque fantasyland replete with lacquered floors and walls colored to her skin. Robbie’s agile performance, her sui generis emotions in extremis, cannot cover the flatness of the written character. Amid such exuberant excess, she pales.
That’s par for the course for Fennell, whose lavish and genuinely prolific visual imagination has never extended to the realm of character. I was flummoxed by her 2020 debut Promising Young Woman, a noxious jawbreaker which coated a dimensionless black core of misogyny with a pastel sheen (and netted Fennell a best original screenplay Oscar); that film, born of pop #MeToo rage, squandered an excellent premise and performance from Carey Mulligan into a single annihilating, dead-ending obsession for rape revenge. I was both momentarily entranced and put off by Saltburn, which sacrificed any character coherence or muddled class commentary for moments of juvenile psychosexual shocks that felt tailor-made to provoke a puritan outrage cycle. In Wuthering Heights, Fennell makes no pretense of social commentary; this is, to quote Vulture’s Alison Willmore, a work of “smooth-brained sensuality” about two messy people who won’t quit each other.
That makes for arguably Fennell’s dumbest and thus best movie, though it is no less frustrating. For lurking just beneath the film’s slippery, stylish surface is a familiar lack of interest in its female characters. Alternately haughty and horny, beseeching and cruel, Cathy is either one-dimensional victim or villain at will, a vessel of the film’s gaudy tableaus. Her longtime companion Nelly (Hong Chau) bears the brunt of her scorn. A fascinatingly unreliable narrator in the book, Fennell reduces Nelly, explained here as the bastard daughter of another landlord hired to serve Cathy, to merely conniving spectator, her motivations compressed to base jealousy and bitter resentment.
Worst of all is Linton’s sister Isabella (Alison Oliver), a simpering, daft creature fixated on dolls and ribbons. Oliver is by far the funniest part of the movie, but there’s a sinister shade to her infantile mannerisms and obsequious devotion to Heathcliff. (Fennell, in typical blunt fashion, literalizes the book’s dom-sub valence to their relationship with a dog collar.) Isabella epitomizes the film’s strikingly dim view of its women, who are rudderless, rash and, with the exception of Nelly, hopelessly entranced by Heathcliff. Upon learning of his marriage to Isabella, Cathy pouts. “He’s mine,” she petulantly cries – not because she loves him, but because she named him as a child.
These are, indeed, childish characters, and not in definitionally petty way (though they are that, too). Literally child-ish, in that they embody the crude, totalizing emotions of adolescence. Perhaps Fennell is attempting to convey the extreme societal constrictions on 19th-century women; perhaps she is interested in how thwarted desire blunts our faculties, can turn even the sharpest of us into strange, strung-out creatures. But I detected, once again, Fennell’s uncanny and seemingly unknowing knack for pop culture titillation, for commercial if not cinematic benefit – namely, the persistent fixation with girlhood, identifying with and returning to prolonged adolescence. Wuthering Heights strains for adult passions and postures with the conviction of a teenager stuffing her mother’s bra.
For all its aesthetic excess – and though I may not agree with Fennell’s vision, I will defend its intemperance – there’s a strange small-mindedness to this adaptation, a failure of romantic imagination. I am as susceptible as anyone to overwhelming loudness, for being so smacked in the face with sublime audiovisual stimulation that it turns my brain off. (Coincidentally, the best music by Charli xcx, who composed the film’s soaring, synth-y soundtrack, does this in spades, and I include the movie opener House in that.) But the problem with hinging a film on self-destructive eroticism is that it requires a self to destruct – the messy, confusing, contradictory substance of desire. Otherwise, it’s just dress-up.
