Emerald Fennell cranks up the campery as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on the windswept Yorkshire moor as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM. Margot Robbie’s Cathy at one stage secretly heads off to the moor for a hilarious bit of self-pleasuring – although, sadly, there are no audaciously intercut scenes of thirst-trap Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, simultaneously doing the same thing in the stable, while muttering gruffly in that Yerrrrrkshire accent of his.
This then is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or rather “Wuthering Heights”; the title archly appears in inverted commas, although the postmodern irony seems pointless. Cathy is a primped belle quivering in the presence of Heathcliff, who himself is a moody, long-haired, bearded outsider, as if Scarlett O’Hara were going to melt into the arms of Charles Manson. However, he does get substantially Darcyfied up later on, rocking a shorter and more winsome hairstyle, his gossamer-thin shirt never dry.
As a child, young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) is a pert miss, indulged by her roistering old twinkly eyed squire of a dad, in which role Martin Clunes pretty much pinches the whole film. Fennell incidentally abolishes the character of Cathy’s elder brother Hindley from the book (along with his wife and son) reassigning Hindley’s ruinous boozing and gambling to the father; Fennell also, in line with traditional WH adaptation, loses the next-gen second half of the novel, about the grownup children of Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff. She also very feebly erases the issue of Heathcliff’s dark skin – and maybe those inverted commas are intended to shrug off issues of “authenticity”.
On a lordly whim, Mr Earnshaw rescues a young scallywag from the streets of Liverpool while there on business, and adopts him as a step-brother to Cathy; this, of course, is Heathcliff, played as a pinch-faced boy by Owen Cooper (the young star of Netflix’s award-winning drama Adolescence). They run around ferally together as kids, but as adults of the near-aristo and servant class respectively, there seems no way to consummate or even acknowledge their feelings for each other.
The family’s fortunes being in dire straits, Cathy marries wealthy milquetoast neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), thus breaking the heart of Heathcliff, who storms off; he returns, wealthy, after a few years and has a passionate affair with Cathy, who learns the truth about why he left. When he ends up spitefully marrying Edgar’s simpering sister Isabella (played by Alison Oliver, amusingly channelling Sophie Thompson). Fennell makes light of his cruelty to her by casting Isabella as a smirkingly consenting sub.
As for the all-knowing housekeeper Nelly Dean (played by Hong Chau), she is the trickiest figure in the book, the person through whose eyes almost all the action is seen. Nelly is English literature’s uncrowned queen of the unreliable narrators, the deadpan witness-instigator of the central catastrophic misunderstanding that destroys Heathcliff and Cathy’s happiness. Interestingly, Fennell does get Cathy to confront Nelly on this point. At some stage, of course, things get real and a tsunami of tears is uncorked; it’s all in a frantically, exhaustingly Baz Luhrmann-esque style and the movie begins to resemble a 136-minute video for the Charli xcx songs on the soundtrack.
Wuthering Heights doesn’t have the live-ammo impact of Fennell’s earlier films Saltburn and Promising Young Woman or, indeed, Andrea Arnold’s flawed, brilliant, primitivist take on Brontë’s novel from 2011, which really did believe in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.
