JAN MOIR on Wuthering Heights: For any woman who’s dreamed of driving a man mad with desire or having her bodice ripped off, this is the goth porn film for you!

The reviews are in for Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ and many of them reach the kind of withering heights a filmmaker should only read in a quiet parsonage with a fortifying glass of sherry and a slice of seedcake to hand.

‘Garish and silly,’ wrote one reviewer. ‘Astonishingly bad . . . a limp Mills & Boon,’ said the Independent. ‘A bastardisation of Bronte,’ said another of Fennell’s take on the much-loved gothic novel by Emily Bronte, which arrives in cinemas just in time for Valentine’s Day and stars Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in the iconic roles of Heathcliff and Cathy.

While professional opinions on the film are polarised, the 350-strong audience at the West End screening I went to on Tuesday night pretty much loved it – and, to my own astonishment, so did I.

It would be gratifying to be part of the intellectually superior anti-Wutherers, grumbling on about Fennell’s lack of respect for the original text and her glutinously sexed-up scenes, but I simply cannot. For, love it or hate it, the 40-year-old writer and director of the 2023 film Saltburn has delivered a bold and imaginative take on a classic – reinventing it for a new generation with gusto and style.

Yes, I have issues. To my ancient, Kevin Costner-crusted eyes, weak-chinned beanpole Jacob Elordi is about as rugged as a cashmere shrug, while even at a radiant 35 years of age Margot Robbie seems too old, too primped and too plucked – steady, now – to play the teenage ingénue of popular imagination, thrashing around the Yorkshire moors in her nightie.

And spare me the sweaty Saltburn-adjacent squelch of assorted body fluids, of kitchen maids lasciviously kneading balls of helpless, squeaking dough and of Margot’s Cathy slowly sticking her index finger into the unyielding mouth of a jellied trout at dinner in a scene that is highly charged with eroticism, should you happen to be a carp.

Yet this slightly overlong 137-minute film still manages to capture something elusive and marvellous and potent about the messy madness of thwarted passion and doomed love.

You cannot tear your eyes away from the pulsating, pop video vision, the colour-drenched sets or the clammy perversion of Cathy’s Thrushcross Grange bedroom; the pink walls upholstered in a padded latex approximation of her own skin, right down to the pale blue veins and the occasional mole.

For her core audience of young women desirous of thrills and bedazzlement, Fennell has a talent for the moment and can capture the female gaze better than many contemporary directors. I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp when Heathcliff strode into Cathy’s skintastic bedroom through the French doors, candlelight guttering on his boyband biceps and his eyes ablaze with rumpy pumpy as a confetti snowstorm fell outside.

Elsewhere there is no end of rain-drenched kisses, artfully deployed droplets of lusty sweat, heaving bosoms, fiery sunsets, galloping horses and broken hearts to satisfy even the most lovelorn. Yes, it is silly – even childish and ridiculous in parts – but it also features fabulous cinematography and has some bonkingly funny moments; for Emerald Fennell is nothing if not a Jilly Cooper for the Zoomer generation. ‘This is my funny Valentine,’ she should be singing from the rooftops.

And for anyone out there who has ever dreamed of driving a man utterly mad with desire, of having her bodice ripped off, of being ravished in the back of a richly upholstered Brougham or pressed against a rock on a windy moor by a man in a pussy-bow muslin shirt, I have news. Girls – and boys – this is the goth porn film for you.

‘I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine,’ says Heathcliff in the novel – surely one of the most poignant sentences in all English literature. It goes to the very heart of what Wuthering Heights is about, and is a sentiment that even the Bottega Veneta manbag ‘ambassador’ Jacob Elordi – accessorised here with a gold tooth and a gold earring to signify Heathcliff’s newfound wealth – cannot ruin.

That is one reason why I cannot agree with the likes of American commentator Brett Cooper, who appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored to complain that the film is not just ‘weird and sexual’ but also a ‘crime against British literature’, dismissing it as Fennell’s personal fantasy and deriding her for turning the classic into ‘soft porn’ rather than a faithful retelling.

As anyone who has read it knows, any exact reconstruction of the original novel would not just be unfilmable, it would be unwatchable, too. The sprawling structure, the unreliable narrators, the who-cares second part that features the troubled offspring of the main protagonists.

The relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy is all that readers really care about. And let us not forget that it was written by a shy woman with no known sexual or romantic relationships.

Emily Bronte was never courted, she never married, and remained unkissed and unknowing in the ways of men. She died at the age of 30, still a virgin, by common presumption.

The famous relationship she wrote about was a torrent of repression, sexual tension and raw imagination that surged out of her subconscious; a passion on the page that could never have been sustained in real life.

‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,’ she wrote, a perfect example of the language that gives Wuthering Heights its enduring appeal – a power that Fennell understands so well.

Her film has also ignited a woke controversy over Heathcliff’s casting. In the 1847 novel his racial identity is sometimes alluded to as non-white, but poor old Emerald has been criticised for putting Elordi in the role.

This was not a problem when Laurence Olivier was cast opposite Merle Oberon’s Cathy in the 1939 version, nor with any Heathcliff since. It certainly did not come up in the 1992 version, starring Ralph Fiennes in a portrayal so intense that after seeing it, Steven Spielberg cast him as evil Nazi commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List.

Meanwhile, what did the naysayers expect? Fennell could not have made her intentions clearer. From the start she claimed that this was her reimagination of Bronte’s classic. She even put inverted commas around the ‘Wuthering Heights’ film title, as if to plead: do not take this ‘seriously’.

She describes her film as a ‘fever dream’ that captures how she felt when first reading the book as a teenager – and in this she has succeeded, boiling the story right down to the basics, giving us a romantic melodrama played at full tilt.

There are no graphic sex scenes, no nudity, not a single glimpse of nipple or buttock, thank goodness. Yes, there were longueurs when I thought ‘Oh, get on with it!’ as Elordi was busy brooding in the hayloft looking like a sulky Jesus or when Margot was swishing around in blood-drenched skirts like Halloween Barbie. But overall, it hit the heights for me.

The film opens in cinemas this Valentine’s weekend, and it is going to be a huge, huge hit with fans.

You might love it, you might hate it, you might worry that Fennell is single-handedly going to put the modern sisterhood back into corsets in one giant, regressive step for womankind.

There were quite a few corseted women in the audience on Tuesday, sobbing into their free ‘Wuthering Heights’-branded tissues, complete with a Come Undone sticker on the front of each packet.

Oh, stop it, I love it, as Cathy says to Heathcliff. Over and over again.