Victorian purists, look away. From the moment Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights opens, with a public hanging in which the deceased’s involuntary erection is gazed at by an aroused nun, one thing is clear: do not watch this expecting Emily Brontë. This is Fifty Shades of Grey with windy moors and crinoline.
It is a brash, funny, extravagant spectacle about sex and death, pain and pleasure, and – most of all – fashion. Milkmaid corsets, vintage Chanel, latex wedding dresses. Move over, Kate Bush. There’s a new Wuthering Heights look in town.
And thank goodness. Is there any point adapting a classic like this again if you’re not going to do something new with it? Like other adaptations, this one has done away with the second half of the 1847 gothic novel, which dealt with the next generation’s inherited trauma, and is interested only in the toxic romance of its stars Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), whose eventual shenanigans rival Bridgerton for, er, initiative.
This is Fifty Shades of Grey with windy moors and crinoline (Photo: Warner Bros)Director and screenwriter Fennell is less a fan of pathetic fallacy, it seems, and more into straight-up, stormy hill sex. That’s not to say there’s no symbolism: the camera is always in pursuit of some provocative sensual imagery: a finger running its way through broken eggs that resemble bodily fluids, bread being kneaded like bosoms.
Young Cathy Earnshaw is played by a terrific Charlotte Mellington, whose cheeky high-handedness enraptures abandoned Heathcliff (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) from the first moment he is brought home by her drunken father. Mr Earnshaw (a brilliantly manic Martin Clunes) is a confusing brute, laughing one minute and raging the next whenever he feels insufficiently appreciated.
It is a brash, funny, extravagant spectacle about sex and death, pain and pleasure (Photo: Warner Bros/PA)Cathy is forced to praise and apologise to him ad nauseam – a push-pull dynamic that sets her up for a lifetime of disordered love. Heathcliff and Cathy race across the wild North Yorkshire heather, hiding from the real world at Penistone Crag and promising eternal fealty.
When they grow up, they are so intertwined that their unconsummated love is deeply co-dependent long before Cathy seduces wealthy neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), in an attempt to marry up. Fennell has exchanged the book’s genteel poverty for a harsher, more Dickensian homelife, where Mr Earnshaw’s worsening orthodontics are a visual bellwether for their declining social status.
Edgar’s place is a palace by contrast, with rooms full of dresses from French ateliers, gilded four-poster beds and a giant doll-house containing a miniature Cathy made with her own hair crafted by Edgar’s fanatical ward, Isabella (a very funny Alison Oliver).
Elordi and Robbie have great chemistry, and Elordi retains a very necessary tenderness throughout all the love and loathing (Photo: PA/Warner Bros)The aesthetic is unapologetically, anachronistically absurd: all rococo ceilings with shiny disco flooring, gigantic strawberries and outlandish taxidermy. There Cathy stands, lonely in her oxblood dress, in a room where the wallpaper is literally of her own face (“My wife’s freckle!” Edgar proclaims proudly, pointing to a brown mark imprinted on the fleshy walls).
There is nothing for Cathy here except herself. When Heathcliff returns to reclaim her, rich, jealous, and relentless, his violent need offers a pulsating warmth that viscerally reignites the film, and her.
The whole thing is disconcertingly funny, with Robbie flouncing around making much of Cathy’s childish mean streak. Fennell deploys her always excellent comic timing masterfully, cutting, for instance, from those sexy eggs directly to Cathy dipping toast into a soft-boiled one for breakfast.
The film also has a lot of fun with the sadomasochism hinted at in the book. One scene where Cathy observes a servant couple engage in BDSM horseplay is wickedly stirring. Elordi and Robbie have great chemistry, and Elordi (his northern accent perfect) retains a very necessary tenderness throughout all the love and loathing. “We are doomed,” says Cathy sweetly as a child. And oh yes, they are. Wonderfully, compellingly doomed.
I wanted more than glamourous despair and frilly dresses (Photo: Warner Bros/PA)Fennell though, a director with so much vision, surely has more to offer than just handsome, amusing films that resemble great music videos. Like Saltburn (2023), Wuthering Heights is extraordinary to look at and laugh at (and listen to, thanks to Charli xcx’s moody soundtrack), but stops short of making you really think.
I wanted more than glamourous despair and frilly dresses, and indeed the strength of the aesthetic threatens occasionally to overpower the raw emotion. Somewhere in this story was a more cohesive exploration of Mr Earnshaw’s complex legacy and the implications of slavish sexual devotion.
It’s so close to perfection but not quite there. Like Cathy, Fennell should look beyond the trappings of lavish design, and reach for greater depth. But, oh when she does, what a sight that will be.
In cinemas from 13th February
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