WUTHERING HEIGHTS: “A Review”

I have never been a particularly voracious reader. I don’t dislike it, mind you. When I do crack a book that captures my imagination, I feel enriched and mildly addicted. It is just never my first choice when there are an infinite amount of movies to see. Many of those films are adaptations of books, which leaves me as a print critic in a bit of a conundrum when it comes to delivering the best possible analysis. Sometimes, the source material is an adjacent work that, at most, provides some additional texture to the resulting film. No disrespect to Emily Henry, but I don’t need to read The People We Meet On Vacation in order to rate the recent Netflix adaptation three-and-a-half stars and say “sure, it is an enjoyable romcom.” However, that scenario shifts when faced with releases like Emerald Fennell’s “WUTHERING HEIGHTS.” Since I was not ordered to read this book in my high school or college English literature classes, I never did. And in an attempt to prepare for this review, I admittedly fumbled with the audiobook for a couple chapters, but the dense prose as read by Aimee Lou Wood just wasn’t clicking. Most adaptations of classic stories stick to the material religiously, so I was feeling less self-conscious about evaluating the story and the filmmakers’ executions as I saw fit. As glibly hinted at by the quotations around the title, Fennell’s version is anything but a straight recreation. In an interview with Fandango, she justified it like this: 

“The thing for me is that you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is ‘Wuthering Heights’, and it isn’t.”

This unorthodox approach to the text puts me in a bind as a critic. I can (and will) express to you why I think that “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” is a drab and uncharacteristically boring film from Fennell, a filmmaker who I am usually far more complimentary towards than most of my peers. However, my take will be missing many important pieces. I only have a cursory knowledge of how it subverts (to put it politely—many would say butchers) Emily Brontë’s iconic text. My relationship to these characters is entirely rooted in the versions that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi “brought to life” before my eyes. I am disappointed in this film as a fan of Fennell’s, not as a scholar. We are living in a time where the internet has given every human being on earth a voice and a potential platform. People spew off hot takes that are loud and wrong without any regard for reality. For many, talking about movies has spiraled into solely addressing “do I agree with this work morally.” As I grow older, I am more determined to approach my craft with the discipline and rigor it deserves. When I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t getting through that Wuthering Heights audiobook, I spiraled. I felt like a complete failure. That I shouldn’t even review the film at all. 

Then I remembered Fennell’s words. This is a “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” she concocted out of sheer emotion and free will. Why should I hold myself to a higher standard than she did? 

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN announced Fennell as a brash boundary-pusher. These are bleak stories that are littered with violence of all stripes, tackling harsh themes through imperfect and often unsuccessful characters. They set the audience up for catharsis only to pull the rug out, leaving us bruised and dirty, yet, she’s not esoteric or inaccessible. Her sensibility is pure pop. Her previous features are vibrantly shot and colored, scored with bubbly needle drops and accented with glib humor that’s entirely inappropriate for the dark subject matter at hand. This in theory seems like a perfect match to salaciously modernize a work like Wuthering Heights from homework assignment to crowd-drawing high concept fare, but, sadly, “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” is actually not high concept at all. It is a bog standard, vanilla take on the well trodden forbidden romance formula: a daytime soap with better sets and just a little onscreen sex. 

We follow the fraught romance of Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) from cradle to the grave. Heathcliff is pulled off the streets by Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes) and given to her as a “pet.” Cathy names him after her brother who passed away and the two form an intimate bond that becomes heated in adulthood. Unfortunately, Cathy is expected to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Their hidden desires come to the surface in a heated moment by a rock formation but Cathy decides to shove it down and Heathcliff departs in a rage. Some years later, Cathy is content but bored in her marriage, and Heathcliff returns. His long hair and beard are gone. He’s got some nice clothes on. He speaks more clearly and smokes a pipe. He won’t say what he’s been up to, but he has the money to buy the Wuthering Heights estate from Cathy’s father. The two very quickly act on their intrusive feelings under the watchful and envious eyes of Edgar’s ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), and longtime housekeeper, Nelly (Hong Chau).

Separated by seven years and eleven inches, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi do not have one iota of chemistry. They are both tremendous talents who are clearly making a noble attempt to find… something. Lengthy gazes. Forceful lifts, lunges, and deep moans during sex. Intense confessions of love. It all just feels calculated, as if they consulted with a focus group of sexually frustrated middle-aged women to pinpoint exactly what moves would make them gasp in a movie theater. Individually, they’re both serviceable with a couple of standout scenes. Robbie’s Cathy may primarily operate on her manic impulses, but she cannot disguise her turmoil. Whenever even mildly challenged, tears start poking through, and only the niceties of the time prevent the other characters from calling her bluff. Elordi is fighting for his life against just how utterly miscast he is in this role. Addressing the obvious, it is painfully apparent to me even from just this version that Heathcliff loses something when portrayed by a white actor. The film paints his eternal turmoil around being othered as entirely a reflection of his social class. He’s just a boy from the streets! Surely that can never change. While that surely was a plight that some impoverished white men faced in this period, it doesn’t quite gel with the level of disdain that other characters treat him with. An actor of color would’ve filled in this blanks and also given the film a more aggressive hook. BRIDGERTON notwithstanding, we rarely see interracial romances in these types of period stories depicted in modern filmmaking, and it’s the exact type of truly felt forbidden taboo that rings through the centuries. For a story Fennell lauds as difficult, her version goes down like baby food.

Elordi is a bit too convincingly posh (even for an Australian) to sell Heathcliff’s rugged aggression. In the first act, we see him lumbering around the stables with his giant Tarzan wig, bushy beard and washboard abs. Even while dirty, he’s so clearly manicured, and his gentle delivery doesn’t help. In fact, Owen Cooper (Adolescence) brings such a significantly sharper edge to his brief turn as young Heathcliff that when he grows up into marshmallow Elordi, it doesn’t even feel like the same person. He’s more believable once Heathcliff returns, but when he has to go from heartthrob to sadist, it is never scary. We’re just watching Euphoria’s Nate Jacobs in an older suit. Fennell latched onto Elordi as a muse after gelling so well with him on SALTBURN, and in that partnership she failed to consider instead what would actually be best for the material. 

The high-profile marketing campaign promised a visually and sonically transportive experience that would set the mood for Valentine’s Day. So much for that. We spend most of our time either staring into dreary fog or taking in the lavish Linton estate. The latter is not injected with the pop of color necessary to make us feel like Cathy could even be tempted by this more financially comfortable life. The rooms are lavish, but cold; the only real pop of expression is a wall in Cathy’s bedroom painted with a dot that resembles a freckle on her neck. Meanwhile, Charli xcx’s much hyped original soundtrack largely takes a backseat. We only hear a couple of the songs in full (during the film’s most visually expressive scenes), but otherwise it’s mostly her vocalizing as Anthony Willis’ handsome but generic score drones on. It is all so punishingly and uncharacteristically self-serious. 

If Fennell was truly so intent to present a unique “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” she needed to make an expressive film, one that isn’t so clearly a studio picture; something where these characters could feel feral, cruel, and even offensive. Bring in the abrasive no holds barred comedic cruelty of John Waters and tie it into a corset. Why not blast that Charli soundtrack until the theater shakes? Baz Luhrmann would! Fennell is playing in the dullest way imaginable. Bending the story into a palatable package that has just enough “finger in a dead fish’s mouth” or “title card made out of hair” moments to make her more squeamish audience members feel like they’re sinning a little might’ve worked in 2006, but it’s 2026. The world is on fire. If we’re burning books, let’s see those pages sizzle.