Emerald Fennell’s latest, fluid-spattered endeavor is a Technicolor take on Wuthering Heights, arguably the greatest and most influential gothic novel of all time. You know the main beats of the original IP, or you should: Cathy and Heathcliff grow up under the same eerie roof and bond with one another for life, but their myriad mistakes and vicious dispositions drive them apart and make everyone around them miserable. Eventually, Cathy dies giving birth to her mini-me daughter and Heathcliff becomes a singularly abusive landlord.
To this, Fennell adds her signatures—campy, horny details, and (as Tina Fey pointed out, almost clairvoyantly, in an appearance on the Las Culturistas podcast) a third act that takes a sexually violent turn we're meant to be surprised by. Although Fennell layers on the bombastic visual flourishes—including baseball-sized strawberries and a river that runs blood red—her adaptation ruthlessly scales down the most genius elements of Emily Brontë’s epic horror-romance; elements that probably felt too abstract and ineffable to suit the third-time director’s tastes. Put another way, this is Wuthering Heights for silly, semi-culturally literate people who love bright colors.
In one scene, bored, lonely and missing her moody childhood love interest, Cathy Linton (played by Margot Robbie, distractingly dolled-up in ribbons that infantilize rather than garnish her beauty) leans forward at a dull dinner and sticks her pointer finger, slowly, through a brick of clear gelatin until her digit broaches the gaping mouth of a dead fish. Cathy, like the trout, has been embalmed, Damien Hirst-style, in a candy-hued manse packed with freaky architectural details—a fireplace bedecked with white plaster hands, red-lacquered floors, and Cathy’s bedroom, which her adoring and unfulfilling husband Edgar has upholstered in some uncanny material that precisely mimics the tone of his wife’s skin. Meanwhile Cathy and Heathcliff, eternal children, keep slipping eggs into each other’s beds; someone’s sheets are always squelching with yolk.
The most obvious stylistic comparison here is Marie Antoinette, but Sofia Coppola’s 2006 pop-scored biopic was as fevered at its core as its trappings were frivolous; when Kirsten Dunst’s monarch fled down a hallway to the sounds of The Strokes, you believed in her anguish, and when she lolled around on a lush hill in springtime with her lover Axel Fersen, you felt—as she felt—the chemistry she’d been dying to experience since her wedding to the geeky Louis XVI. Fennell’s Cathy (Margot Robie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) don’t generate the same kind of heat when they go at it in the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, or in the garden in the rain, or on the moors.
Visually, as it happens, Fennell seems to have drawn far more inspiration from Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 perverted girl-power Bildungsroman Poor Things. As the black-haired and sexually voracious Bella Baxter in that film, Emma Stone made mincemeat of the phantasmagorical steampunk sets that populated Lanthimos’ world. Her reanimated heroine felt so believable because Bella’s unfettered lust all but bled through the screen. Fennell’s universe is no less beautifully shot, but Robbie’s Cathy merely flounces around its moors, pouty and blandly impetuous and indistinct. When Ms. Earnshaw masturbates furiously with her back against a boulder, you don’t really buy it.
As Heathcliff, Jacob Elordi—whose 6’ 5” stature fits the film’s whole larger-than-life theme—spends the first act hidden behind a scraggly wig, and once he emerges from beneath it, he strides through the mists outfitted with a single earring to show that time has passed. In the end, he swoons over Cathy’s corpse with a concentrated anguish that almost moved me to shed a tear—but Elordi should have channelled more of the pure evil he injects into his Euphoria villain Nate Jacobs. Heathcliff is actually a monster! Elordi fails to fully put the pedal to the metal.
The film’s key moments are set to Charli XCX’s superlative soundtrack. An innovative pop artist who always understands the assignment, Charli has tapped into the elemental agonies of the original text with far more lucidity than Fennell, and the film is much improved by her involvement. Hell, it would have probably been amazing if XCX (Bronte-worthy real name: Charlotte Aitchison) had thrown on a corset and played Cathy herself.
Ultimately, Fennell clearly set out to create something massive and infectious; an overblown romantic confection so high on sex and itself that you just had to love it. But by unfettering Cathy and Heathcliff from the “restrictions” of their canonical chastity—in the original text, the pair never consummate their tortured relationship—Fennell has shrunk her protagonists beyond recognition, making their epic passions feel almost pedestrian. An unfathomably dark and toxic lifelong connection between two genuinely depraved people is reduced to a torrid affair that’s broken off when one participant feels too guilty to continue.
Eventually, a despondent Heathcliff rebounds with a vaguely icky dom-sub dalliance with Cathy’s sister-in-law. Allison Oliver’s portrayal of the singularly pathetic Isabella Linton is the best thing about the movie; at my screening, the audience rippled with uproarious laughter after Isabella’s every squeaky-voiced utterance, and boy, does she get down in this movie. She gifts Cathy a doll adorned with her own hair. She openly lusts after Heathcliff and crawls around on the floor like a dog at his behest.
Oliver definitively plants her flag in her introductory scene. Having fled Wuthering Heights, Cathy listens at the Lintons’ garden wall as a goofily over-earnest Isabella regales her brother with a breathless, beat-by-beat breakdown of Romeo and Juliet. Isabella’s monoglue functions as an utterly succinct meta-summary of “Wuthering Heights,” the movie, as a whole, a film that feels like a quirky, shallow friend whispering the broad strokes of the book’s story into your ear. Sure, she’s getting a few plot points wrong, and she’s leaving several things out, and she seems to be inventing several bodice-heaving sex scenes where previously there were none. But the sound of her voice is musical and lovely and you’re enjoying the scent of her perfume as it washes over you. In other words, you’re having fun, so perhaps the finer details don’t really matter.