On the way to see the new Wuthering Heights adaption, I launched into a little rah rah speech, preparing myself for potential traumas that lay ahead—if the film stayed faithful to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. “Get ready for some sexual assault,” I chanted quietly to myself, as I biked to the theater. “Get ready for some little dog tooooorrture!”
Then, in a surprising turn for a film from writer-director Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve, Promising Young Woman), I left the theater feeling like I had just seen your average, run-of-the-mill, non-Emerald Fennell movie. Yes, it contained child abuse—but no more than in your average Disney movie. Yes, there was a public execution, a gristly hog butchering, and a finger penetrating a fish encased in aspic—but I was expecting so much worse. The sex was consensual. There was an awful lot of blood, but the effect was quite stylish.
How Fennell’s Wuthering Heights came to be a pretty basic tale of two conventionally attractive, weird (but not too weird!) people who are hot for each other is a mystery. Fennell has described Wuthering Heights as a canonical text in her teenage years, and furthermore seems to have actually read the book, which is no small feat, since it’s a densely written bezoar of fractured timelines, oscillating narrators, and multiple characters with the same names.
If anyone could pull off a film that accurately captures the novel’s complicated vibes, it would be Fennell. Her most recent film Saltburn (2023) felt—despite its ’00s setting—like fan fiction set in a Wuthering Heights extended universe (especially the grave-fucking).
This new version has any potentially sharp edges dulled even further by disregarding the fact that in Brontë’s book, the character of Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is clearly coded as nonwhite, and Elordi is a very white guy. Fennell’s choice to cast nonwhite actors in a few other roles (Hong Chau as Nellie Dean and Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton) could have added something new, but both parts are so thin that neither actor is given the scenery that they deserve to be chewing.
That said, none of the roles in Wuthering Heights are particularly likable. “There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible,” wrote one reviewer in 1848, the year after the novel was published. You could see Brontë’ as the Bong Joon Ho of Victorian lit.
Cultural norms have changed since then, but the book remains timelessly, omnidimensionally fucked-up—both a case study of how people can turn their bad relationship choices into everyone else’s problem and of how much abusers depend on people who seem outwardly kind and yet choose not to protect more vulnerable people or even themselves.
As the final credits rolled I felt the absence of Fennell’s undelivered asshole auteur masterpiece. I was left wondering: Was this the film Fennell wanted to make? Did something stymie her? However, I was also relieved that no one had tried to strangle a dog onscreen. At a cultural moment with so much real-life cruelty, I can only take so much of the pretend kind.
This adaption’s cruelties (some are new!) were mitigated by the movie’s absolutely bombastic production design. There was so much to appreciate. There were campy, ridiculous outfits to enjoy and an effusive sensation that the actors portraying Heathcliff and Catherine (Margot Robbie) were actually having the time of their lives, even as they were also squeezed into their costumes like little sausages. Catherine wore some truly hideous hairstyles, many of which seemed to have been inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The design for Edgar Linton’s mansion looked like absolute blinged-out insanity, like a cinematic argument to not letting anyone get wealthy enough to do that kind of decorating.
Fennel’s Wuthering Heights appears destined for a long afterlife as a teenage slumber party staple. As I watched it, the earliest review came when Heathcliff appeared with a Lord Byron-meets-boy-band haircut, clad in tight pants, backlit by the setting sun. From a dark corner of the auditorium, an absolute shriek of delight rang out. I doubt it will be the last.
Wuthering Heights opens in wide release on Fri Feb 13, 134 minutes, rated R.
