Wuthering Heights: ‘wildly fun’ reinvention lacks depth

It was “sensible” of Emerald Fennell to put quotation marks around the title of her film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”, said Matt Maytum in NME. It’s a “fair warning” this won’t be a faithful retelling of the 1847 novel.

Instead, the scene is set for something “a little more arch, playful and scandalising” that’s sure to “stir up heated discourse among literary purists”. But if you embrace Fennell’s “bold vision” and accept her film on its own terms, it’s difficult not to get “swept up in this gothic tale of toxic attachment”.

‘Resplendently lurid’

Fennell’s film is “far from faithful to the original book”, said Caryn James on the BBC. But if you think of it as a “reinvention not an adaptation”, it’s an “utterly absorbing” film. Brontë’s ill-fated lovers are still present, but Fennell’s approach is “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic”.

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Like the book, the action takes place against the backdrop of the rugged Yorkshire moors, but “contemporary” touches have been added, from the sex scenes to extravagant outfits “fit for an Oscar red carpet”.

We’re first introduced to Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) as a young girl living in a “crumbling” old house with her “increasingly drunken, destitute father” Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. One night, he brings home a “foundling”, Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), who soon becomes a playmate for his daughter. But the children’s sibling-like relationship soon develops into “something dark and taboo”.

The narrative jumps forward a decade and the chemistry between Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is palpable. “Resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”, the “central illicit affair” between the pair begins to unfold, their encounters accompanied by a series of “breathy electro-ballads by Charli XCX”. This is an “obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions”.

‘Astonishingly hollow’

I found it “whimperingly tame” when compared with Fennell’s earlier films like “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. She has used the “guise of interpretation to gut one of the most most impassioned, emotionally violent novels” in history. “Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.”

Even the “much-vaunted trysts” between Cathy and Heathcliff are short-lived and perfunctory, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Sorry people, but the kink proves mostly straitlaced, the S&M more M&S.” But the “biggest shock” is the “damp” chemistry between the stars.

There are issues, too, with the casting of Elordi that go far beyond the controversies around “‘whitewashing’ a character of ‘dark skin’”. Heathcliff is meant to be a “wild” and dangerous character; “here, he has the sad eyes of a Labradoodle locked out of the front room”.

By the end it feels as if Brontë’s tale has been repurposed into a “20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

“It’s all wildly fun, a fever dream come to life,” said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. But I was left feeling disappointed. “When the sexy sugar rush passes, what’s left?”