Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date—a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. The camera lingers on dripping egg yolks and squishy, bubbling dough; the protagonist, Cathy Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie), must wade through pig’s blood on her way to the moors near her home, leaving a trim of viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress. This is Fennell’s aesthetic throughout: loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface.
The clash of beauty and filth is well-suited for Brontë’s desolate tale of romance in a tempestuous climate, where Cathy is constantly caught between Victorian propriety and her baser, wilder nature. Fennell’s take is thuddingly blunt; it brings the book’s simmering sexual repression to a boil. Wuthering Heights, sprawling and objectively tough to capture faithfully, hinges on the unbalanced, teenage energy of its central relationship—here, expressed through glossy, MTV-esque visuals that the director deploys with aplomb.
As with almost every cinematic interpretation of Wuthering Heights, the plot’s more unwieldy second half is disposed of entirely. Fennell has also stripped down the first half, removing some major characters and simplifying the motivations of others. She focuses largely on the bond between Cathy and her tortured lover, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), from quasi-feral childhood on. Some of these changes might feel mercenary to superfans of the novel; I count myself among them. I love the loopy directions the book’s later chapters veer in, so I expected to greet this new version with crossed arms. Instead, I was impressed with the director’s narrowed focus. She’s managed to make a weighty work feel nimble.
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Thematically, Wuthering Heights is reminiscent of the director’s previous movie, Saltburn, which also saw a rough outsider infiltrating the upper class in Britain. Saltburn’s near-contemporary setting, however, didn’t really suit Fennell’s unsubtle storytelling approach; the entire ensemble seemed cartoonish, their fancy trappings chintzy and fake. In Wuthering Heights, she more successfully turns the howling Yorkshire moors that Cathy wanders into a stylish fantasyland, reminiscent of a Meat Loaf video’s flamboyant theatricality. Everything is appropriately dialed-up: The titular mansion that Cathy lives in is a dark, foreboding shambles, while at the estate next door, there are rooms entirely devoted to ribbons. One of the chambers is even wallpapered to look exactly like Cathy’s skin, down to the freckles.
Cathy and Heathcliff’s emotional ties begin at a young age. One day, her father returns home with an orphan in tow; she quickly bonds with the boy, named Heathcliff, and they become a gleefully untamed duo. The years pass, and soon enough, the pair are all grown up—but no less primitive. (Robbie is a stretch as the 20-something Cathy, but her performance is winning enough that the viewer can largely keep that out of mind.) Some more civilized tenants, the sweet-but-stuffy textile heir Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his sister, Isabella (Alison Oliver), move into the estate next door. With them comes the wedge that drives Cathy and Heathcliff apart: the harsh realities of class and Victorian society. Cathy might be as uninhibited as Heathcliff when roaming the outdoors, but a woman of her status can’t be allowed to marry a foundling, especially one who now works for her family as a servant. She’s nudged into Edgar’s arms, transforming Heathcliff into a vengeful, horny demigod of sorts. Heathcliff is the paragon of Byronic anti-heroism, which, to Fennell, means that he’s as cruel as he is seductive. She sands off the more abusive edges of his literary counterpart, but he’s still domineering and callous, hell-bent on embarrassing a community that can’t take him seriously as a potential husband.
Robbie and Elordi’s chemistry is strong, and both are major Hollywood talents who can smirk, scream, and sob with the best of them. The gleeful visuals and sounds, however, are what really propel the movie along. There are ravishing songs by the pop star Charli XCX, surprisingly none of them too out of place; some truly ridiculous costume choices for Cathy as she embraces Edgar’s hoity-toity life; and all of that goo, blood, and viscera. The film opens with what sounds like erotic groaning over a black screen, which is revealed to be the final gasps of a man being hanged. Touches like these could not be more direct, but they work here—Fennell wants the audience to think about how closely sex and death are intertwined. This is especially true for Cathy and Heathcliff, who might honestly rather expire than be apart.
The story’s dreamy and at times ludicrous emotional landscape often struggles on more realistic grounding. In 2011, the great director Andrea Arnold attempted a version of Wuthering Heights with a much more muted, credible tone, even casting a mixed-race actor in the role of Heathcliff (in the book, his ethnic background is pointedly ambiguous). Although Arnold’s attempt was interesting, it felt flat, bereft of Brontë’s eccentric flourishes. Fennell has streamlined the book’s narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages.
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