Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë’s only published novel has always been utterly batshit, and director Emerald Fennell’s take on the gothic ‘romance’ of Wuthering Heights follows suit, as peculiarly cold as it is visually decadent. The destructive aspect of Cathy and Heathcliff’s obsessive love is front and centre, yet it’s hard to care about Margot Robbie’s bratty Catherine Earnshaw – who seems too old to be acting this teenage – and Jacob Elordi’s boring, one-note Heathcliff. In the book he is ‘wild’ and deeply charismatic. In the film, he is… tall? 

For those unfamiliar with the unhinged masterpiece, Cathy has been infatuated with Heathcliff since her widowed father brought this mysterious boy to their Yorkshire home. Fast forward to adulthood and Heathcliff has buggered off, while Cathy has married their neighbour, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), who in Fennell’s delirious vision lives in a kaleidoscopic Rococo palace. Heathcliff then returns, stonkingly rich. She wants him, and he wants her, but they cannot be together as Cathy is now pregnant with Edgar’s child. 

In the book, this leads to much unconsummated yearning, but Fennell – who infamously made Barry Keogan stick his dick in a freshly dug grave in Saltburn – gets the pair romping with impunity. This is, naturally, after Cathy experiences her sexual awakening while spying on household servants having a kinky stable-based encounter. But despite all this shagging, Wuthering Heights is not even Fennell’s horniest film. It’s hard to care about such unsympathetic characters – Cathy and Heathcliff behave abominably – making any moments of intended emotional or erotic impact fall flat. Fennell also decides to completely ignore one of the novel’s most interesting aspects – that Heathcliff isn’t white (and is also potentially Cathy’s half-sibling) – thus absolving her of having to deal with anything as thorny and fascinating as historic race relations. 

Fennell gets the pair romping with impunity

Fennell makes those wild moors howl with passion, and when it comes to interiors, Linton’s house seems imagined by Kubrick on a dose of Yorkshire’s finest shrooms. In his ludicrously lavish mansion, bedroom walls are laced with veins and dotted with freckles, while fireplaces are covered in hands, making the house as human as those living in it. Why? Well, it’s hard to know. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes for Cathy sit somewhere between Cruella De Vil-esque femme fatale and Sound of Music cottagecore twee, and she’s shot like she’s starring in a 1990s Vogue spread by avant-garde stylist Isabella Blow. 

Those here for Brontë Behaving Badly will get their kicks largely from Heathcliff’s pivot to perversion in the film’s third act, which is also the only time he shows anything approaching a personality.

Mainly, it’s the solid supporting cast that glues the film together. Cathy’s father, Mr Earnshaw, is given a fantastic drunken villain energy by Martin Clunes. A terror in a tricorn hat, he gifts every scene he’s in with a campily sinister air. Alison Oliver is equally impressive as Linton’s dizzy ward, a cheerful simpleton obsessed with ribbons. Hong Chau, as Cathy’s stoic companion Nellie, is given one of the best lines in the film, and a sympathetic Shazad Latif makes Linton seem like a genuinely nice guy who has Cathy’s best interests at heart, making it even harder to understand her desire to run off with the lanky oddball with terrible chat. 

Wuthering Heights was never written as a traditional romance, rather a tale of obsession, revenge, bitterness and betrayal. Still, it helps if you're made to care about its doomed lovers.

In cinemas worldwide Fri Feb 13.