Wuthering Heights (15, 136mins)
Verdict: Style over substance
When the people at Visit Yorkshire see just how much rain buckets down in Wuthering Heights, they will surely call a crisis meeting.
Last Thursday’s London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s eagerly-anticipated film could hardly have been wetter – and the deluge wasn’t just on screen.
Outside the Odeon, Leicester Square too was awash, as if in solidarity with those wild and windy northern moors about which Kate Bush ululated so memorably, all those years ago.
Later admitting that she hadn’t even read Emily Bronte’s novel when she wrote the lyrics, Bush’s song rather mangled the plot.
I’m sure Fennell knows the book backwards but she does Bronte no favours either, re-imagining the story as a dark fairy-tale with unsubtle nods to Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, then adding lashings of kinky sex. It’s less Wuthering Heights, more Fifty Shades of Grimm.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, the moody pair who give Romeo and Juliet a run for their money as literature’s most star-crossed lovers. Except on the page their love is never consummated.
Emerald Fennell re-imagines Bronte’s story as a dark fairy-tale then adds lashings of kinky sex. It’s less Wuthering Heights, more Fifty Shades of Grimm
Fat chance of that on screen; they’re at it everywhere, every chance they get.
As children (played by Charlotte Mellington, and Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame), the two bond across the class divide after Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes) brings a grubby urchin home to Wuthering Heights, the family’s remote Yorkshire farm.
In adulthood, their tempestuous mutual passion intensifies when Heathcliff returns, his social status enhanced, after years away. But by then she has married her wealthy, cultured neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).
At 35, Robbie is clearly way too mature to play Bronte’s complex teenage heroine. Back then, a woman of her age might have reasonably expected to be a grandmother.
But if we overlook that, she and Elordi are both extremely pleasing on the eye, and there’s no reason why a couple of Australians shouldn’t play two giants of English fiction. Tom Hardy played Mad Max, after all.
Unfortunately, their Cathy and Heathcliff are so irredeemably shallow and selfish that I could not have felt less invested in their emotional tumult – which in the run-up to Valentine’s Day is being wildly hyped as ‘romance’.
The pair are not what you’d call likeable in the book, either. But readers have been buying into their toxic obsession with one another since 1847.
Here, Fennell has pared back the story, either tinkering with characters and sub-plots or removing them altogether. The middle Bronte sister (of the three who became writers) won’t be turning in her grave so much as rising from it, in a state of what the early Victorians would have called perturbation.
At 35, Robbie is clearly way too mature to play Bronte’s complex teenage heroine. Back then, a woman of her age might have reasonably expected to be a grandmother
Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame plays Heathcliff as a child
Of course, Fennell is by no means alone in deciding to adapt a celebrated novel for the screen, then fiddling with the story as if the original wasn’t quite up to snuff. Producer Sam Goldwyn famously insisted on a happy ending to the 1939 version starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier.
But that’s a much more satisfying film than this handsome but ultimately empty exercise in style over substance, cinematography over soul.
Some of it teeters on pastiche. Clunes plays Mr Earnshaw as a gin-soaked, tyrannical brute, as one-dimensional as a cardboard cut-out, and manifestly not the sort of fellow who might take pity on an urban ragamuffin.
Edgar’s sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) is used purely as comic relief, at least until the vengeful Heathcliff marries her and subjects her to degradation worthy of a porn film.
We saw in her wicked comedy-thriller Saltburn (2023) that Fennell likes to foist somewhat alarming sexual peccadilloes on her characters, so she was never likely to tackle Wuthering Heights without reaching for the sado-masochism manual. But honestly.
In the book, the Earnshaws’ servant Joseph is a God-fearing old codger. Here, as played by Ewan Mitchell, his lusty horseplay would make your average sex maniac blush.
This adaptation is a handsome but ultimately empty exercise in style over substance, cinematography over soul
There are costume and design flourishes that appear to be inspired, if not directly pinched, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s deliciously nutty period drama The Favourite
Fennell sexes up her film in other ways too, with deliberately anachronistic music by the hip singer-songwriter Charli XCX, as well as costume and design flourishes that appear to be inspired, if not directly pinched, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s deliciously nutty period drama The Favourite (2018).
Which is all well and good, but it’s to service a love story between two people that I simply didn’t care about, and I doubt I’ll be alone.
‘I think you like to see me cry,’ Cathy accuses her lifelong companion Nelly Dean (Hong Chau). ‘Not half as much as you like crying,’ Nelly replies, and she has a point. Added to the relentless rain, Cathy’s incontinent blubbing makes this a very watery film indeed. Except where it really counts, in the audience.
As the final credits rolled, so far as I could tell, there wasn’t a damp eye in the house.
Wuthering Heights opens in cinemas on Friday
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