Even though Emerald Fennell has only two feature films to her credit, people have come to expect a certain degree of depravity from her. The director of and has built a reputation based on wicked acts; whether you love her or hate her, you can at least count on her to push boundaries and provoke in ways that others wouldn’t even consider. She’s a curator of scandalous shocks, and while most of them are short-lived, Fennell seized a great opportunity to break that pattern with Wuthering Heights. The classic novel by Emily Brontë is the original dark and twisted fantasy, but it has been interpreted so many times that only a mind like Fennell’s could find something new in the material—even if it means distorting it completely.
From the moment Fennell revealed her racy vision for the film, discourse erupted around it, like thorns choking a garden wall. But what’s disappointing about Wuthering Heights is its failure to live up to the hype. The internet had imagined a take on pulpy, steamy Harlequin novels or a cheeky self-insert scenario with Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, but Fennell doesn’t take such risks here. Her Wuthering Heights is neither entirely fictional nor all that scandalous, leaving us wondering why it needed to be revived in the first place.
The original Wuthering Heights is a prickly, haunting text filled with ghostly apparitions, 19th-century prejudice, and hatred so intense that it corrupts to the core. Fennell strips away a lot of that to focus on the heart of the story, the tragic romance between the bratty Catherine and the gruff Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). The two have been inseparable since childhood, when Catherine’s father (Martin Clunes) rescued Heathcliff from a life of indentured servitude and made him his ward. “He shall be your pet,” Mr. Earnshaw tells a delighted young Catherine, introducing one of the conflicts that Wuthering Heights will spend most of its two-hour runtime merely skirting around.
Heathcliff is Cathy’s pet in many ways: He takes beatings for her when Mr. Earnshaw’s good nature turns sour due to liquor. He works on their eponymous estate as it deteriorates, and when wood is scarce, he breaks the chair he’s sitting on to make a fire for her. It’s swoon-worthy material, with each moment delivered with perfect intensity by Elordi. His charisma becomes a fitting focal point of this adaptation, although his casting completely undermines a key aspect of the character, his status as the racial other. One might spend much of Wuthering Heights wishing for more from Robbie—she approaches this more like a gothic spinoff of Barbie, wearing kitschy costumes by Jacqueline Durran—but it’s not hard to understand why her Catherine falls so deeply for Heathcliff or why she runs from his affections. The pair bickers like siblings until the bubble bursts between them, and the film is at its best when building that tension against a lush, sensual backdrop. In the wild, untamed moors, their inappropriate attraction seems natural, even predestined. But Cathy’s desire to marry well, combined with manipulative advice from her companion Nelly (Hong Chau), eventually drives Heathcliff away.
Fennell takes a lot of liberties with Brontë’s text, but those changes are easy to overlook when she allows her world to speak for itself. Her shot selection is purposeful, even cheeky, and the cutaway gags bring the film closer to what it should have been: a pastiche. Storybook sets by Suzie Davies reimagine the Heights as a brutalist dollhouse, with pitch-black walls and doors so small that Elordi’s Heathcliff has to bend down to enter a room. Meanwhile, the Earnshaws’ neighbors at Thrushcross Grange live on an estate more reminiscent of an Austen adaptation. That dollhouse imagery becomes more significant when Cathy catches the eye of the Grange’s master, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and stumbles into the kind of life she’s always desired. He creates a shrine to Cathy by painting her bedroom the pale peach color of her skin, including blue veins and freckles, while his ward Isabella (Alison Oliver, the true heroine of this production) uses Cathy’s hair to make creepy dolls. When she places her creation in a smaller-scale replica of the Grange—which has its own dollhouse inside, and yet another deeper within—we and Cathy immediately understand the trap of an advantageous marriage.
It’s the details that make this particular version of Wuthering Heights so valuable. They tell a story much deeper than the one Fennell seems interested in exploring, as her script smooths out the most challenging parts of the narrative to focus on its toxic relationship. On one hand, that makes sense: this is a story too complex to lend itself to a completely faithful adaptation. But Cathy’s ill-fated bond with Heathcliff is equally strong, which forces this adaptation to rush through crucial stages of their relationship. Heathcliff disappears for five long years after Cathy marries Linton, and when he returns to the moors—cleaned up, newly wealthy, and determined to destroy Cathy’s world—their reunion throws our story into a whirlwind love affair.
But the real enthusiasts might be disappointed by the lack of passionate scenes here. It’s all rather passively sexy at best, with half-hearted nods to kink used sparingly to arouse us. Fennell glosses over everything that could make this at all transgressive, presenting a revolving door of racy moments entirely through montage. A soundtrack by Charli xcx and a throbbing score by Anthony Willis do their part to add some energy to the proceedings, but this adaptation fails when the text calls for something more profound; it might have worked better as a music video.
Wuthering Heights shows Fennell at her most perplexingly restrained, not only in the substance of this romance but also in her attempts to modernize it. The film is great fun when it’s bold enough to mock the gothic and the erotic, exploring its dark themes with a wild, winking sense of humor. But it also wants to aim for soapy, sweeping melodrama—and, like Cathy with her feelings for Heathcliff, it realizes this too late. Its sudden shifts to sincerity ultimately undermine everything, from Fennell’s original intention to the core bitterness of Brontë’s original text. If Fennell were ever going to push the envelope, it should have been here; her decision to play it safe feels like the ultimate betrayal.