Emerald Fennell recasts Emily Brontë’s doomed lovers in a lush, sexually charged reimagining.
By Dana Barbuto/Boston Movie News
A body jerks at the end of a rope. The camera doesn’t look away. In the opening moments of writer-director Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” a public hanging becomes a public spectacle: a man’s neck cinched in a noose, his robe unable to hide the unmistakable outline of a “death erection.” The crowd presses in, flushed and hungry. The air feels swollen, engorged with anticipation. Onlookers hump in the streets. Before the corpse has stopped twitching, Fennell has announced her intentions: this will not be a chaste stroll across the wind-swept Yorkshire moors. This will be a story about desire and punishment, about the thin membrane between ecstasy and annihilation, about the cost of choosing security over love.
It’s a brazen way to approach Emily Brontë’s only novel, that storm-lashed 1847 tale of obsession and revenge. But Fennell has been candid: this “Wuthering Heights”—the quotation marks are an intentional choice to show the movie is not a direct adaptation—is her 14-year-old self’s interpretation. That tracks. At 14, the books passed between my friends weren’t the ones found in English class; they were well-worn copies of a Judy Blume, a Jackie Collins or a Jilly Cooper. We smuggled them in backpacks like contraband, pages dog-eared at the good parts. We did the same with VHS tapes—”Risky Business,” “Porky’s,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”—anything that throbbed with the promise of skin and bad decisions. It felt illicit. Electric. Like a girlhood rite of passage.
Fennell bottles that teenage voltage and pours it straight onto the screen. She strips away Brontë’s elaborate structure—no nesting-doll narrators, no second-generation fallout—and zeroes in on the original toxic twosome: Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, childhood soulmates turned obsessive lovers who would rather scorch the earth than live without each other. From the moment Cathy’s drunken father (Martin Clunes) drags a feral orphan (Owen Cooper, an Emmy winner for “Adolescence”) into the house and announces, “He shall be your pet,” the fuse is lit. Young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) carves “C + H” into the landscape. They race across the wind-whipped hills, mud-splattered and inseparable. He takes the beatings meant for her. “I will never leave you,” he promises, no matter what she does.
As adults, they’re played by Margot Robbie (“Barbie”) and Jacob Elordi (a current Oscar nominee for “Frankenstein”), two high-gloss bodies weaponized for maximum impact. Fennell and her “Saltburn” cinematographer Linus Sandgren keep the camera greedy—trained on Robbie’s flushed face, her veins and freckles lit like topography, on Elordi’s bare chest and torso as he looms and prowls. He looks, in some early scenes, like a dangerously pretty savior—hot Jesus with a grudge. Together, the actors torch the screen with a push-pull rhythm that feels more like foreplay than courtship. The lens lingers on the bright orange yolk of a raw egg splitting under curious fingers (warning: eggs might not taste and feel the same after seeing this movie). Wetness is everywhere: rain, sweat, tears. Jacqueline Durran’s sumptuous gowns (one is vinyl!) cling in all the right places. Red is the film’s dominant pulse—curtains, dresses, floors, sunsets that bleed across the sky—the color of a heart pumping too hard inside a ribcage.
As is de rigueur for Fennell, the erotic charge is constant and rarely subtle. Heathcliff lifts Cathy by the laces of her corset, hauling her upward until the fabric strains and their breath shortens. There are lingering eye-fucking glances across long tables and candlelit rooms. A shirtless Heathcliff stretches over a face-down Cathy, sliding his palm over her mouth as she spies through a floorboard at someone else’s kink. Later, on the moors, he catches her alone behind a rock; he approaches, draws her busy fingers into his mouth and vows to follow her “like a dog” to the end of the world. Fennell luxuriates in this space between almost and not yet, stretching anticipation into a narrative strategy.
Plot, such as it is: Cathy injures herself spying on the neighboring Lintons and recuperates at Thrushcross Grange, where luxury seduces her. Edgar (Shazad Latif) falls hard. Cathy, dazzled by silk sheets, social status and security, decides to marry him—though her heart still answers to Heathcliff. When Heathcliff overhears her say to her maid Nelly (Hong Chau), “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff,” he misses the rest—the part where she insists they are the same soul—and bolts. Misunderstanding metastasizes. He leaves. He returns, polished and newly rich with vengeance tailored to fit. Yet Elordi is almost too smoldering for the role’s darkest turns. His eyes are too soulful, his wounded-boy magnetism too intact to fully convince as the sadistic architect of generational ruin. Even at his most vicious, he feels heartbreakingly hurt rather than truly monstrous.
As Isabella, reimagined here as Linton’s ward instead of sister, Alison Oliver steals every scene she’s in. She still has a ribbon room and a doll house, but she’s no shrinking violet. Initially skittish and repressed, she transforms under Heathcliff’s seduction into something darker. When Nelly arrives at Wuthering Heights to retrieve her, she finds her chained like a dog. Isabella crawls across the floor and looks up with a smirk, eyes glittering. In Fennell’s hands, she isn’t simply coerced; she consents to the game and relishes her role as tormented pet. It’s provocative, but that’s the point.
Set to a brooding synth-pop soundtrack from “Brat” singer Charli XCX, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” plays like a gothic thirst trap—bodices ripping, ribbons slipping, moors howling. The script isn’t at all faithful in the dutiful sense to the novel, and Fennell, who studied literature at Oxford, is catching a lot of heat for that. But the film is faithful to a feeling: that first rush of discovering that stories—and bodies—can make you burn. Have fun, girls.
‘Wuthering Heights’
Rating: R for sexual content, some violent content and language.
Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver
Director/writer: Emerald Fennell
Running time: 130 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: B+
Boston Movie News 