It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that.
Actually, the story remains pretty much as Brontë wrote it, though Fennell leaves out the entire “next generation” plotline, as did William Wyler in 1939. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the top of wild and windswept Yorkshire moorland – she the wilful daughter of drunken Mr Earnshaw (an excellent Martin Clunes), he the orphan child Mr E brings home one day as “a pet” for his daughter. As the years pass, the young people grow closer until, as teenagers, they fall truly, madly, deeply and forever in love. But because of their differing social situations this is a relationship that can never be. So Cathy, a bit of a minx, sets her cap at the more appropriate Mr Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif, also excellent), whereupon Heathcliff departs in a huff, only to return some years later a rich man. At which point the yearning, longing lusty love that’s always existed between Cathy and Heathcliff starts up again, threatening to destroy everything around them.
Described by Brontë’s as “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”, Heathcliff is clearly meant to have something of the savage beast about him. The slight controversy over Jacob Elordi’s casting – not swarthy enough was the complaint – flies in the face of his being the son of a Basque father, and so “a Spanish castaway” (depending on any given day how Spanish the staunchly separatist Basques themselves are feeling). He’s fine, and for the most part so is Margot Robbie as Cathy. In any case Fennell has changed the sexual dynamic. In this update, Cathy is the sort who likes to frig herself to orgasm up on the wuthering heights when the yearning gets too much. She spends whole chunks of the film biting her lip in an attempt to keep the slipperies at bay, with Fennell regularly cutting away to slimy things – a snail crawling up a window pane – in case we missed Cathy with her hands down her pants. Lethal physical attraction is the idea.
Elordi and Margot Robbie, while fine as actors, and both lovely to look at, seem too old for the roles, but then almost every director has trouble with this film. No one seems to be able to settle on where to pitch it tonally. Even the “classic” version, 1939’s Heights, was a touch constipated. Of the modern ones, maybe Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley got closest to the intensity with the TV version from 2009. The great Andrea Arnold got lost in the brooding in her elemental 2011 version. Fennell has decided to go for a gothic pantomime, and the sensation that Kate Bush’s song is about to break through at any minute – “you had a temper like my jealousy – too hot too greedy” – hangs over the whole enterprise.
It’s expensive fun, I’ll tell you that. For a start this film was shot on actual film, in VistaVision – superwide and penetratingly luscious – and Fennell wants us to know that money has been spent, even if individual scenes work against the film’s overall mood. So, that shot of Cathy charging over the moors in her ridiculously extravagant wedding dress, or that deathbed scene done as if it were a Vogue fashion shoot. Fennell has said that Powell and Pressburger are an inspiration and the interiors of the Linton household are fantastical and unreal enough for that to be plausible. There is something of the fairy tale about the whole thing.
A confectioner’s shop window of gorgeousness, a pop promo, a YouPorn Brontë, the sex scenes on top of the Yorkshire moors look thrilling and steamy rather than an invitation to die of pleurisy. Lust and love are confused, by Cathy and Heathcliff as well as Emerald Fennell. Wuthering, wuthering, wuthering heights – Kate Bush nailed it in four and a half minutes. Fennell does it in 136. You certainly get your money’s worth.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
