A Hollow Echo: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Misses the Mark
Emerald Fennell’s latest cinematic offering, a re-imagining of Emily Brontë’s seminal 1847 novel, “Wuthering Heights,” arrives at a time when our appreciation for literature seems to have shifted. Instead of a tool for intellectual expansion, books are often relegated to mere distractions. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” stylised with quotation marks in its title and accompanied by a director’s note about her teenage experience with the book, uses the veneer of interpretation to strip away the raw, emotional violence of Brontë’s masterpiece. What remains is a hollow shell, draped in the most marketable romance tropes.
The film’s departure from the source material was perhaps foreshadowed by its casting and the deliberate omission of key themes such as race, colonialism, and social ostracisation, which are central to the destructive codependence between pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff. Heathcliff, whose ambiguous ethnicity is a significant point of contention and concern for other characters in the novel, is portrayed by the fair-skinned Australian actor Jacob Elordi. Similarly, Margot Robbie, a blonde and blue-eyed actress, plays Cathy. While Cathy enjoys more social acceptance than Heathcliff, the book portrays her as desperate to conform to the ideals of the wealthier, blonde-and-blue-eyed Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, played here by Shazad Latif and Alison Oliver respectively.
Fennell appears uninterested in these narrative tensions or the visceral emotional core of Brontë’s work. The novel is characterised by a “naked rage so extreme that a contemporary critic wondered how anyone could write such ‘vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’ and not kill themselves after a few chapters.”
A Tame Adaptation Lacking Brontë’s Fury
The film, like the 1939 adaptation and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version, only tackles the first half of the novel. However, the primary issue isn’t fidelity to plot, but rather tone. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is remarkably subdued, especially when compared to the director’s own previous, more visceral works. Characters in “Promising Young Woman” (2020) and “Saltburn” (2023) exhibit a far greater degree of messy self-destruction and self-loathing than anything found in this interpretation of Cathy and Heathcliff.
Heathcliff, in this adaptation, is transformed into a simpering, romantic ideal, designed solely to elicit romantic sighs. He is perpetually ready to shield Cathy from the elements, a stark contrast to the complex, challenging figure in the book. The original Heathcliff is a victim of profound abuse who dedicates himself to vengeance, becoming as monstrous as those who wronged him.
In Fennell’s script, Heathcliff’s primary abuser, Hindley, is conflated with Cathy’s father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes). Both Cathy and Heathcliff are then presented as equal targets of his violence. This simplification reduces the narrative to a familiar tale of a disadvantaged maiden escaping her circumstances by marrying the wealthy but uninspiring Edgar, all while pining for her penniless soulmate. Heathcliff’s eventual return, enriched, is framed as a mere rom-com makeover, rather than his calculated mission to amass the financial power needed to exact revenge on those he despises.
The film seems actively averse to the idea of Heathcliff being anything other than a romantic lead. It constructs a world that leans towards fairytale rather than Gothic masterpiece. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes and Suzie Davies’ sets draw inspiration from cinephile classics like Jacques Demy’s “Peau d’âne” (1970) and Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et la Bête” (1946), complemented by Linus Sandgren’s soft, luminous cinematography.
However, when juxtaposed with Brontë’s own vivid and thorny prose, these fantastical elements, from red riding hoods to arm-shaped candle holders, appear garish, akin to a live-action Disney production. The only moments that inject a much-needed sense of dread, absent elsewhere, come from the musical contributions of Charli XCX and Anthony Willis.
A Failed Attempt at Provocation
As a sadomasochistic provocation, another stated intention of the film, it falls equally flat. Scenes such as a hanged man with an erection inciting a village into a frenzy, or a woman wearing a dog collar and barking, are not genuinely provocative when played for laughs. The film adopts a fetishistic view of class, labelling the poor as deviant and the wealthy as prudish.
The supposedly “wild” Heathcliff never engages in behaviour towards Cathy that would be considered out of the ordinary for a contemporary period drama like “Bridgerton.” His most notable action is often playfully sticking his fingers in her mouth. While Robbie and Elordi possess a certain chemistry, their characters feel so diluted that their performances verge on pantomime. Cathy is depicted as merely wilful and spiky, while Heathcliff is rough yet gentle – little else is explored.
Perhaps a more valuable lesson can be gleaned from this endeavour. Had Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” captured the true spirit of reading Brontë’s novel, at any age, it would be a film that disturbed its audience, not one marketed with Valentine’s Day screenings and brand tie-ins. In the end, Fennell’s misstep is Brontë’s enduring triumph; her original work remains singular and powerful.
- Director: Emerald Fennell
- Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell
- Classification: 15
- Runtime: 136 minutes
- Release Date: In cinemas from 13 February
