“You have a problem with Saltburn? Shhh. Quiet luxury,” says Tina Fey during her 2024 appearance on the Las Culturistas podcast, “Because what are you going to do when Emerald Fennell calls you about her next project […] where Act Three takes a sexually violent turn and you have to pretend to be surprised by that turn?” Did “Wuthering Heights” turn out to be as predictably mindless and gratuitously pornographic as we expected? I paid £13.50 and sacrificed three hours of my life to give you the answer.
Although my Yorkshire identity and love of 19th-century novels make me inclined to defend Emily Brontë with all my might, I really did give this film a chance. I told myself that an adaptation can stand apart from its source material. I let myself be reassured by the fact that “Wuthering Heights” was written in quotation marks in the film’s title, and that this meant that Fennell had a new vision to offer. I tried to withhold judgement until I could fully understand what that vision was. But after what felt like an eternity of trying and failing to find anything of merit in the film, it was the entire audience bursting into laughter as soon as the credits rolled which reassured me that a negative review was both acceptable and appropriate.
I just have no idea what Fennell was trying to achieve. The only question she succeeded in answering was ‘what if Wuthering Heights looked like the batcave?’ Monolith to boot, I’m not joking. It felt like Fennell’s adaptation was constantly trying to reinvent itself mid-movie. She spent half an hour producing trite Netflix original romance, the next actually committing herself to depicting the complex emotion of the novel, then quickly slip into her comfort zone of camp surrealist slop, and as soon as you’d got used to that she pivoted towards slapstick comedy.
In this last iteration I would say she had the most success; Martin Clunes and Alison Oliver deliver incredible comedic performances. The issue is such that alongside them, Robbie and Elordi seem like they too are giving comic interpretations. Nate Jacobs pronouncing his love for Cathy in a half-arsed Yorkshire accent while Charli XCX plays in the background is, in fact, very funny. The only thing more hilarious is to remember mid-viewing that Jacob Elordi is currently nominated for an Oscar for Frankenstein. In “Wuthering Heights“, however, he was outacted by 16-year-old Owen Cooper.In his defence, I can’t help but feel like it was the script that hunkified one of literature’s most complex anti-heroes, not necessarily Elordi’s uninspired portrayal.
My two cents on the discourse surrounding the choice to cast Elordi: it is representative of a systematic disregard for any theme in the novel more complicated than the tragedy of Cathy and Heathcliff’s unconsummated affection (which is itself discarded, since their romance is very much consummated in the film). It goes without saying that Fennell’s defence of this casting as being simply the version of Heathcliff that she imagined in her head is incredibly problematic when the book in fact takes the time to describe his (pointedly not-white) appearance.
Moreover, at the risk of weighing into 200-year-old discourse, even the epithet of ‘inspired by the greatest love story of all time’ makes me think that Fennell did not fully grasp the source material. As the decision to cast Elordi demonstrates, as well as the inexplicable decision to give Isabella Linton a masochist kink, she was not interested in producing a film that retained any of Brontë’s nuanced portrayal of vicious cycles of generational abuse. What the film ultimately illustrates is that Fennell read the book with her eyes closed and her hand down her underwear. The uninspired casting and screenplay follow suit.
I’m being incredibly harsh here and I recognise it. But if I’m disappointed with the film, it is not out of tribal loyalty to a dead author; it is because I mourn the thoughtful adaptation that could have been produced with Fennell’s budget. There were sections of the film that were exhilarating, landscapes that were beautifully depicted, and romantic tension that did feel buzzy, for lack of a better word. But the greatest tragedy of the film was the fact that these glimpses of hope were quickly replaced with something altogether less interesting. Having said that, my theatre was packed, and no doubt Fennell’s polemic creative choices help to drive people to the cinema.
To return to Fey’s prophecy about the film, it doesn’t completely match the sensory nightmare of a period drama that Fennell ended up producing. If I were to be gracious, I would accept that almost two centuries after the novel’s release, society has sufficiently developed to allow her to insert some of the raw sexuality which the original could never be permitted to include. However, my instinct tells me that this kind of film should sound warning bells for a dire media-literacy crisis. I sincerely hope we can limit the number of films we market towards a specific set of 21st century readers and viewers who need to be spoon-fed sexy braindead drivel, in lieu of anything remotely thought-provoking. No disrespect meant to this group, but they have The Kissing Booth, can they not leave the classics alone?
Fennell claims that the book was one of her favourites growing up. This justifies me in critiquing the film in relation to the novel which (apparently) served as a model. It also makes me hope that she didn’t read any other books as a child, that they might be spared her inane vision. However, given that Netflix are depicting Basil and Dorian as brothers in their upcoming adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and with no less than three Austen adaptations in the works for studios to decimate trying to appeal to the modern viewer, it might be time to resign as a cinephile and retreat into a library forever.
