Wuthering Heights
It’s easy to imagine what would draw the writer-director of Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023) to Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights. It’s perhaps the best-known story of a powerless striver avenging himself on the rich and powerful—the pervading theme of Emerald Fennell’s first two features. In the novel (spoiler alert), the brooding, sexy, temperamental Heathcliff loses his great love, Catherine Earnshaw, and sets out to destroy the two families he holds responsible.
That is not this movie. Like many before her, Fennell tosses out the second half of the novel—Heathcliff’s revenge—in favor of enveloping herself and her viewers in the central romance, which the director makes as torrid and as sexual as a 2026 R rating and big stars’ nudity restrictions will permit.
The plot, if you need reminding, is simple: The merchant Mr. Earnshaw, who lives in the ramshackle stone house of the title, adopts a wild boy to whom his biological daughter of the same age soon becomes deeply attached. This childhood friendship blossoms into love, but the girl, Catherine (Charlotte Melllington as a girl), and the boy, dubbed simply Heathcliff (Owen Cooper, Adolescence), are too far apart in social standing ever to hope to marry. When they grow up (becoming Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi), circumstances drive them apart, and Heathcliff disappears for several years.
Whether these secret lovers consummate their connection in the novel is ambiguous; in this steamy dream of an adaptation, you better believe they do. Indeed, their many intimate scenes here serve as the chief evidence of their attraction, since Fennell is the latest of a long line of writers who fails to otherwise account for their elemental bonding. (The limited choices of mates in their two-house neighborhood on the wind-swept heath of rural England is usually sufficient explanation.)
It is what it is: Neither can live without the other, and tragic consequences result. Fennell always ramps up the moral ambiguity in her films, so it’s not surprising that she was attracted by this story of a passion that wrecks most of the lives it touches. But unlike her previous work, morality and manipulation aren’t the focus of the story. This is about unbridled passion above all, and Fennell’s interest seems to be amping up everything around the lovers to make this the most sumptuous and over-the-top Wuthering Heights ever. It’s got cascades of soaking rain, the most elaborate sets imaginable, voluptuous costumes made from oceans of lush fabric; countless painterly landscapes, sunsets, moon glows, etc.; and two of the biggest movie stars of the moment looking their most attractive. (Elordi works both sides of the 2026 sexiness street, appearing bearded and rough early on, then becoming an elegantly handsome fashion plate, with the obligatory old-timey sideburns, later on.)
Indeed, the art direction is bonkers, in the best way. If you’re going to amp up the Gothic, why not walls that look like ripe flesh (complete with freckles and subdural veins), a chimney resembling an explosion of human hands crawling up the wall, or a symmetrical pair of piles of bottles as tall as a 12-foot ceiling?
Indeed, the look of the film—and I include the two leads in that—is the best reason to see this Wuthering Heights. It’s quite the visual feast. The characters, in the film as in the novel, are chiefly types playing out their given parts in the plot threads of attraction, abuse, rivalry, and betrayal. The leads fully commit to the lovers’ manias and madness, which sells the central story well enough. But the performances of the worthy supporting cast—Hong Chau as the meddling servant Nelly Dean; Shazad Latif as Edgar, Heathcliff’s chief rival; Alison Olvier as Isabella, Edgar’s weak sister; Martin Clunes as an especially reprehensible Mr. Earnshaw—are functional rather than complex.
Of course, I can’t know Fennell’s process in arriving at this lovingly overwrought telling of the story, but I have to imagine she came for the allure of Heathcliff—who fits the mold of her previous determined, plotting, underestimated protagonists—and along the way let herself be swept away by the story’s ardor and atmosphere.
Grade: B. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Asheville Pizza and Brewing, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.
(Photo: Warner Bros.)
