‘Wuthering Heights’ Review

Advertised as the greatest love story ever told, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is, in the hands of writer director Emerald Fennell, a repulsive lust story in which two toxic narcissists use their shared trauma and mutual attraction to justify behaving horribly to anybody unfortunate enough to meet them.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve never read the Emily Brontë novel, nor have I seen any of the countless adaptations already put to film and television. Thus this review is specifically, and only, about the Emerald Fennell film, and does not engage at all with whether this succeeds or fails as an adaptation.

As presented here, ‘Wuthering Heights’ follows two shallow and angry people who undoubtedly deserve one another – Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), a detestable, entitled girl of privilege and her young ward, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who she is given as a pet from her abusive father who, through laziness and alcoholism, drives the family to ruin. As Catherine and Heathcliff grow up side by side, they experience varying degrees of the same hardship, with Catherine so blinded by her own pain that she never considers that the servants she gleefully abuses may have conditions even worse than her own. But Catherine and Heathcliff both share a desperate desire to escape their circumstances and, as they grow older, they also grow to be very attractive. That, in total, seems to be the foundation of this allegedly great romance.

As a filmmaker, Emerald Fennell doesn’t seem to like people, and definitely doesn’t understand them, creating world after world in which no behavior is off limits so long as you’re hot enough. Both Catherine and Heathcliff are petty, cruel and violent to every character they meet. Even beyond this loathsome couple, everybody sucks, such that no matter how many ostentatious tears fall in how many cliche rainstorms, this movie lacks heart and humanity.

While ‘Wuthering Heights’ never matches the perverted grotesquerie of ‘Saltburn’, here again Fennell can’t help herself from inserting imagery meant to disgust – closeups of characters fingering runny egg yolks, jellied fish, or just licking walls like weirdos – even as they add nothing to the story or tone. These juvenile attempts to shock come off try-hard, as if Fennell is desperate to show she’s not like other filmmakers, and will be as disgusting as possible to prove it, at the expense of good storytelling.

These prurient distractions are especially jarring given how straight Fennell plays the rest of the story, seemingly wanting to evoke the feelings and imagery of a cheap romance paperback novel, proving she doesn’t understand what it means to be genuinely subversive.

And the storytelling is horrid, with Fennell opting instead to create a Pinterest “Gothic Romance” mood board, or a Charli XCX music video, with that artist’s music used as background to montages of beautiful people being beautiful and melodramatic. By deprioritizing actual storytelling, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a boring slog of a film, with static plotting and flat characters.

The casting for this film is all over the place, with Margot Robbie struggling the most with her character, tasked, as they all are, with playing her character starting from a young age and tracking her growth over several years. Watching Robbie play Catherine as a typically impetuous teenager is irksome, as her abhorrent behavior is made even more ludicrous coming from a fully adult woman. Elordi fares slightly better, given that much of his character early on requires him to be pretty and empty. As the film progresses, Elordi’s Heathcliff exhibits a shocking brutality, delivered with a sly smirk, and Elordi feels well matched for the role.

‘Wuthering Heights’ is a perplexing failure, too mean-spirited to be an effective romance and too desperate for swoons to be a moody character study on the ways familial trauma brings people together and tears them apart.

Wuthering Heights
Rated R for sexual content, some violent content and language.
Running Time: 2 hours and 16 minutes

Director Emerald Fennell
Writers Emerald Fennell
Stars Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell
Rating R
Running Time 136 Minutes
Genres Drama, Romance