Wuthering Heights Is Not The Sicko Gothic Fantasy We Were Promised

Even with just two feature films under her belt, one has come to expect a certain level of depravity from Emerald Fennell. The director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn has built a brand out of wicked acts; love her or hate her, you can at least trust her to push, to provoke, where others would never think to. She’s a curator of scandalous shocks, and though most are a flash in the pan, Fennell seized a plum opportunity to defy that streak with Wuthering Heights. The classic novel by Emily Brontë is the original dark twisted fantasy, but it’s been interpreted so many times, only a mind like Fennell’s could mine something new from the material — even if it means bastardizing it completely.

Like thorns choking a garden wall, discourse sprang up around the film from the moment Fennell unveiled her racy vision for it. But what’s disappointing about Wuthering Heights is its failure to actually meet the moment. The internet imagined a play on pulpy, horny Harlequin novels, or a cheeky self-insert framing with Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw, but Fennell takes no such swings here. Her Wuthering Heights is neither totally apocryphal nor all that scandalous, leaving us to wonder why it needed to be resurrected in the first place.

The OG Wuthering Heights is a prickly, haunting text, overwrought with ghostly specters, 19th century prejudice, and hatred so intense it corrupts to the core. Fennell guts a lot of that to get to the heart of this story, the tragic romance between the bratty Catherine and the gruff Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). The pair have been inseparable since childhood, when Catherine’s father (Martin Clunes) rescued the latter from a life of indentured servitude and made him his ward. “He shall be your pet,” Mr. Earnshaw tells a gleeful young Catherine, introducing one of the conflicts that Wuthering Heights will spend most of its two-hour runtime only dancing around.

Heathcliff is Cathy’s pet in so many ways: He takes beatings on her behalf when Mr. Earnshaw’s agreeable nature is soured by liquor. He works on their titular estate as it slips into ruin, and when wood is scarce, he breaks the very chair he sits on to make a fire for her. It’s swoonworthy stuff, each beat delivered with pitch-perfect intensity by Elordi. His charisma becomes a deserved focal point of this adaptation, however much his casting totally undermines a key aspect of the character, his status as the racial other. One might spend most of Wuthering Heights wanting more out of Robbie — she treats this more like a gothic spinoff of Barbie, sporting kitschy costumes by Jacqueline Durran — but it’s not hard to understand why her Catherine falls so hard for Heathcliff, or why she runs from his affections. The pair squabbles like siblings until the bubble pops between them, and the film is at its very best when building that tension against lush, sensual spectacle. In the untamed wasteland of the moors, their perverse attraction feels natural, even preordained. But Cathy’s desire to marry well, paired with manipulative advice from her companion Nelly (Hong Chau), eventually drives Heathcliff away.

Fennell takes plenty of liberties with Brontë’s text, but those tweaks are easy to ignore when she lets her world speak for itself. Her shot selection is purposeful, even cheeky, and cutaway gags bring the film closer to what it truly should have been: a pastiche. Storybook sets by Suzie Davies reimagine the Heights as a brutalist dollhouse, with pitch-black walls and doors so diminutive that Elordi’s Heathcliff has to stoop to enter a room. The Earnshaws’ neighbors at Thrushcross Grange, meanwhile, live on the kind of estate you’d sooner expect in an Austen adaptation. That dollhouse imagery plays a bigger role when Cathy catches the eye of the Grange’s master, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and stumbles into the kind of life she’s always wanted. He builds a shrine to Cathy by painting her bedroom the pale peach of her skin, blue veins and freckles included, while his ward Isabella (Alison Oliver, the true heroine of this production) uses Cathy’s hair to create creepy dolls. When she places her creation into 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 take on Wuthering Heights so worthwhile. They tell a story much deeper than the one Fennell seems interested in exploring, as her script sands down the most challenging parts of this narrative to focus on its toxic pairing. On one hand, that makes sense: this is a tale far too dense to lend itself to a completely faithful adaptation. But Cathy’s star-crossed bond with Heathcliff is equally robust, which forces this adaptation to speed 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, nouveau riche, and fixed on tearing Cathy’s world apart — their reunion pitches our story fully into a whirlwind love affair.

But the true sickos might be disappointed by the lack of bodice-ripping here. It’s all passively horny at best, with half-hearted nods to kink deployed to titillate us in fits and starts. Fennell skims over everything that could make this at all transgressive, delivering a revolving door of racy moments entirely through montage. A soundtrack supplied by Charli xcx and a thrumming score by Anthony Willis do their part to add some oomph to the proceedings, but this adaptation drops the ball when the text calls for something deeper; it might have all worked better as a music video.

Wuthering Heights gives us Fennell at her most bafflingly chaste, not only with the substance of this romance but with her efforts to update it. The film is great fun when it’s brave enough to thumb its nose at the gothic and the erotic, exploring its dark themes with feral, winking wit. But it also wants to shoot for soapy, sweeping melodrama — and, like Cathy with her feelings for Heathcliff, it realizes that far too late. Its wild pivots to sincerity ultimately undermine everything, from Fennell’s initial intent to the bedrock of bitterness from Brontë’s original text. If Fennell ever were to push things too far, it should have been here; that she chooses to play it safe feels like the ultimate betrayal.

Wuthering Heights opens in theaters on February 13.