"Wuthering Heights"

dir: Emerald Fennell

2026

“I think I’m going to die in this house…”

That could be my favourite part of the film – a song used that is a collaboration between Charli XCX, a very young, very successful international pop star, and John Cale, one of the oldest living people around. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a song that would be the intro to a horror movie, and it’s used at the beginning of this film, to set a tone.

What’s this film called, you say? “Wuthering Heights”. Not Wuthering Heights. ”Wuthering Heights”. Those quotation marks will cost your soul extra.

Cinematic provocateur and something of a deviant Emerald Fennell directs her version of the story by Emily Brontë that is almost nothing like the story written by Emily Brontë. Sure, it’s a famous book, but almost no cinematic version of it is like the actual story, which is why most versions of the story are pretty crappy. It’s not a romance, the book, I mean. It’s mostly obsessed with who gets to inherit which properties, like most books of the 1800s. Love and cruelty play second fiddle to real estate.

This film is meant to be romantic. It’s changed enough in a way to make it “more” romantic, but it’s no less tragic in the end (although, with so much left out, it also leaves out further tragedy and also the supernatural elements of the last part of the novel).

This flick flickers in between multiple strange states, at times overdone and over-designed, and yet goofy and a little bit empty. There are flashes of (gross) earthy ‘realism’, and yet a level of set design and art direction that often makes it look like a fairy tale / Tim Burton movie.

At no stage does the house referred to as “Wuthering Heights” look like a real place, though the moors around it are made to look like barren, hostile places unfriendly to humans or animals, or variations thereof. Young Catherine Earnshaw is delighted when her father brings home a stray boy (Owen Cooper) as a pet, and she even gets to name him Heathcliff. Young Catherine Earnshaw’s father, though (Martin Clunes, brilliant in his sheer awfulness), is a capricious and emotionally unstable drunk. The same feelings that prompted him to ‘save’ the boy result in him lashing out at the boy, in cycles of generosity and viciousness, which the boy interprets as him having to protect Cathy. He takes all the abuse if it means she is protected from her father’s rage.

What a way to bond, and, what a terrible bond. Catherine as a child is quite an annoying brat, and yet when she graduates to a teenager (now played by 35-year-old Margot Robbie), she’s still a selfish brat but we’re meant to find her charming, for some reason, yet she’s mostly a blank space. Heathcliff now is played by another fellow Australian, 28 year old Jacob Elordi, who actually puts on a Yorkshire accent to go with the scenery. In the book he was mostly tormented by Hindley, Cathy’s brother, forced to work as a servant later on, but since there’s no Hindley, the father does the violence, but Heathcliff works as a servant because it’s necessary, since the family is destitute due to Earnshaw senior’s gambling and boozing.

Heathcliff and Catherine taunt, torment and tantalise each other, as any version of this story most go, but instead of really changing the source material it panders to it and results in the breach between them when Cathy decides to marry neighbouring Edgar Linton (Shazad Latiff), and Heathcliff scarpers in order to get rich or die trying.

Cathy’s time at Thrushcross Grange is surreal and surreally artificial. Edgar has a ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver) who dotes on Cathy (at first), even down to making dolls of her with her own hair (salvaged from her hair brush), to be placed in massive doll houses (it’s bigger than at least one apartment I once lived in) that has recursively smaller versions stretching into infinity (not quite). Isabella’s adolescent enthusiasm and fixations also push her in the direction of fitting out rooms (or at least getting servants to do so) such that they match Cathy’s skin tone, texture and freckles.

At no stage does Thrushcross Grange look like a real place when they’re inside it, what with its shiny floors and empty rooms with mantelpieces made up of thousands of plaster hands.

As I might have alluded to, this is very much a film an art school graduate surrounded by other art school graduates would make (with lots of money and no constraints). There is so much fingering going on in this film, so many allusions to bodily fluids… I wanted to avoid talking about it but I feel like I can’t, really. The flick starts off screaming “EROS sort of = THANATOS”, “Sex and death, SEX AND DEATH!!!” that you really can’t hear any of the subtext over the text.

It starts with a hanging that seems to make half of the people present supremely turned on, and the other half confused as to what their real feelings are. It’s something so horny and pervy that to say that if you hated Saltburn, her previous foray into bodily fluids and strange motivations for killing people, you’re probably going to hate this flick too, does not feel like an overstatement.

It kind of toys with the idea, a centrally very defensible idea, that Wuthering Heights itself was written by someone who had very little actual experience of actual human relationships or sexuality, but who conjured feverish and quite adolescent melodramas to fuel / feed those impulses. So, like for many a teenager, there’s so much emotional confusion, jealousy, longing, pining, unsatisfied yearnings and desires that can’t be channelled anywhere healthy.

It’s the visual and dramatic embodiment of how Isabella is depicted. Impossibly naïve, unknowingly obsessed with sex but completely without context or experience and incredibly desperate for attention. And we see how vulnerable this makes her, when all of Heathcliff’s sadomasochistic tendencies are unleashed.

Thwarted desire can lead to terrible outcomes, or overwrought art, but the tension comes from the fact that it’s thwarted.

And yet this flick annuls all of that by actually having Heathcliff and Cathy requite their love over and over and over again, all over the place, all over the moors as well.

Does it change the story for the better? Well, if you like watching attractive people simulate sexy times on screen, this could be catnip for you, but if something like this is catnip for you, there’s probably some shelf space you could free up by donating those copies of the 50 Shades books to a local charity, and get some decent filth/erotica instead.

Both of these actors have done similar stuff in other flicks, but they didn’t really click as these characters. Elordi can play brooding brutes in his sleep, but this performance doesn’t even click the way his version of the resurrected fiend recently did in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. That was simultaneously monstrous yet affecting, and yet somehow I bought his love for Elizabeth then unlike what’s on offer here.

There are too many scenes where someone, quite often Heathcliff, but almost anyone else as well, asks Catherine a question, and the next shot after the edit is of a close up of her face as if she’s going to say something profound (she doesn’t) or do something with her face, and there’s just… nothing. She isn’t able to convey or asked to convey anything with subtle expressions or any hint of inner turmoil. Some actors can convey a bunch of emotions with the slightest inflections, someone like Kate Winslet, Tilda Swinton (at her best), Olivia Colman, Isabelle Huppert; they can conjure a world of emotion by doing the least amount of effort.

Margot Robbie? She was perfect in certain other roles, but here? She can’t even hide her Aussie accent much of the time.

It’s… not a great performance, but then maybe the fundamental problem is that this flick doesn’t either make or allow Catherine to be an interesting character. She just isn’t.

Five or six years seem to transpire since Heathcliff went on his merry way, and the impression we’re given is that she does nothing for all that time other than have sex with her husband, which is very dutiful of her, and make so many costume changes that we’re meant to think that she’s transitioning from a Disney princess to a Disney villain.

For six years? Surely that got dull real quick.

And that is another of the flick’s crimes – taking a beautiful man like Shazad Latif, who played the legendarily obtuse Clem Fandango in Toast of London, or Ash on Star Trek Discovery, or Dr Jekyll in Penny Dreadful, and making him look like a middle-aged fuddy-duddy here as Cathy’s cuckold of a husband. You took a punky, lanky fuckboy and made him look like David Mitchell complaining about the answer to some dull crossword puzzle. For shame!

The film commits many other sins, don’t you worry about that. Because it takes a certain other path for Cathy (in the book she dies in childbirth at the wise old age of 19) , one which still ends in tragedy, there is a lot of wheel-spinning and overlap, with the repetition of a number of scenes, and the thwarting of communication occurring again and again due to one dastardly character, in order to lead to that outcome. It’s a bad change, it’s an unnecessary change. It doesn’t work other than on the perverse visual level, conjuring a (vile) vision of leaches applied to Cathy (to help with septicaemia) getting confused and climbing onto the flesh coloured walls, for a final torrent of blood to erupt like the Red Sea itself in her final moments.

I hesitate to say that the film at least works on a strong level visually because perfume commercials also sometimes have strong visuals, but they’re pretty superficial, lacking in substance (because Capitalism!). This entire flick has the feeling that you’re watching a commercial, one that has bold colours and visual motifs, but nothing to go along with in that has any depth. My truest gauge of just how unaffecting the whole thing was is that I am a total sap for romances, for tragedy, for declarations of undying love, for the smallest gestures of kindness, to the point where tv commercials can make me tear up (or even watching videos of that monkey Punch dragging around that orang-utan from IKEA at that Japanese zoo), and yet I was completely unmoved by any of this. I marvelled at how little emotion any of this long arse movie conjured within me.

It’s… not really that worthy of our time, sorry to say. And here’s another unfair comparison: I didn’t feel like it was a patch on the Andrea Arnold version of Wuthering Heights that she made in 2011. That definitely fucked with the source material but kept true to its cruellest elements, and felt raw, and real, at least, and made the Yorkshire moors look like the cold brutal places that they are.

This? Not even your gran is going to be impressed by or enjoy this.

5 times Heathcliff, it’s me, Floppy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold, let me into your window oh oh oh out of 10

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“Catherine Earnshaw, I will love you 'til the day that I die, and forever after.” – from the mouths of babes - ”Wuthering Heights