Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff love, lose and love each other again across the windswept decades, risking all. (For my plot recap click here)
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” looks like the cover of a Gothic romance and trembles with the eroticism of a Mills and Boon, and as usual with Fennell’s symbolism-rich films it’s often as subtle as a loudhailer in a monastery. I won’t lie though, as I pitched up to the cinema straight from a frenetic day at work I rather welcomed having everything pointed out to me, several times.
The deliberation is in the detail, which makes the straightforward, cut-down story rather welcome. It’s overwhelming for the senses – the colours, the weather, the unintentional humour, the dresses! – but not confusingly so. It is A LOT though which maybe explains why one of my favourite scenes was, by Fennell’s standards, pared back: a rainy funeral in a moorland cemetery, perfectly tilting black wooden crosses atop every grave, with the black-clad Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) sneaking off for a snog behind a granite boulder.
And while the film is melodramatic, lurid, grimy and wet, it’s also gorgeous and romantic, and left me yearning middle-agedly for a remote, cosy moorland cottage stocked with an Ocado delivery of elaborate puddings.
I even liked the Charli XCX tunes and I haven’t really listened to any new music since Britpop.
Fennell’s adaptation is apparently based on her teenage reaction to the novel, and her “Wuthering Heights” does look like the fevered, if not entirely accurate, imaginings of a teenage girl; those years when you know of life and love but haven’t experienced it, filling in the gaps with your own overwrought imaginings. (There is lots of fully clothed sex.)
Characters are teen stereotypes: Isabella the obsessive, lonely, outspoken girl who doesn’t fit in; Cathy the rich mean girl with the rough brooding boyfriend; Edgar the safe father figure.
Even the elaborate outfits look like a teen’s favourite foods. Isabella, living in sumptuous luxury, generally looks like confectionery: an elaborately piped cream bun, a pink and white striped stick of rock. Cathy’s cellophane wedding nightie looks like she had a fight among the boiled sweet jars in a Mr Simms.
Like the 1939 Merle Oberon / Laurence Olivier classic, Fennell covers only the first half of the story, though her version also cuts out further characters. There is no Lockwood, no Wuthering Heights: The Next Generation and no Hindley, though that (a) adds to the intensity and (b) removes confusion over all the “H” names and multiple Cathys.
Cathy Earnshaw dressed for the British weather
Cathy Earnshaw, the young daughter of a well-to-do but thuggish landowner, meets the scruffy, morose Heathcliff when her father brings him home from Liverpool. Soon fierce friends, they roam the moors, until separated in adulthood by misunderstanding and marriage. Their love only intensifies, threatening to destroy themselves and others down the years.
Fennell’s style of writing and directing (stylistic metaphors and simple stories, taken to extremes here with sets of engorged luxury or tasteful squalor) will surely also appeal to an abandoned younger generation craving not just romantic love but also certainty. Despite Heathcliff being labelled a cruel brute he doesn’t seem nearly as bad as in the book. Even when he’s telling Isabella (Alison Oliver) how badly he will treat her, he repeatedly asks he to tell him to stop, and later admits he has met his match.
Everywhere are symbols of Cathy’s containment (even when free on the moors she rarely strays from what she knows). From Wuthering Heights’ chessboard floor to the dolls house version of Thrushcross Grange actually in Thrushcross Grange, and her new bedroom’s walls that mimic her own skin, Cathy escapes her father and penury to wall herself up in a beautiful prison. The grey rocks of the local crags are swapped for giant jewels in her massive necklaces, the angular black stone farm for the wedding cake-like pastel symmetry of the Grange. Meanwhile Heathcliff lollops over the hills like a taciturn werewolf, his home decaying into the moor, unable to escape her.
Robbie and Elordi are good together, though too old for the kind of hormonally-charged first love affair that taunts one down the years (to be fair, Olivier was no spring chicken either). And it does make this pair of hell-crossed lovers seem incredibly petulant. An unlikeable, selfish teen is just a teen; an unlikeable selfish adult is just unlikeable.
There are some terrific supporting performances. Hong Chau, as paid companion Nelly Dean, glowers tautly with the unfairness of her position: the illegitimate daughter of a lord, her star falling as the low-born Heathcliff’s rises. And also Alison Oliver, whose Isabella starts off as an annoying stalkerish prude and ends up barking like a dog, and apparently enjoying it. But top of the pile (of empty gin bottles, probably) is an impeccable Martin Clunes as the alternately brutal and cringing Mr Earnshaw, rotting from drink and failure in his tumbledown house. Thanks to Clunes, Earnshaw is never a figure of sympathy even at his lowest; but he is also never a total monster.
Fennell also harks back to that 1939 version, a dark but sincerely romantic story of the type so loved by teenage girls. Many of Oberon’s outfits as Cathy hits local high society are just as gorgeously frothy, glossy and impractical as Robbie’s, the film itself deliciously melodramatic. (Its title card also, like many of the time, in inverted commas.)
For similar reasons it reminded me of Anna Biller’s indie hit The Love Witch. Biller is a lover of old movies and gothic romance (including her own genre novel, Bluebeard’s Castle). When I interviewed her in 2017 she corrected me that what I called melodrama is “just classical, theatrical acting… they have strong voices, they speak clearly and enunciate”, and I think Fennell probably agrees. Fennell is not a knowing provocateur. Her films are sincere and earnest, values that younger audiences seem to appreciate.
“Wuthering Heights” does seem a natural follow-up to Saltburn and not just because both star Elordi and Oliver. Both films have a class usurper leaving a trail of dead posh people in his wake (Heathcliff, Oliver) and hangers-on who hate the class that demeans them while also believing it their natural home (Nelly, Farleigh). While Fennell is wealthy and well-connected, I think she’s not just talking about class but still trying to work something out about it – before always shying away from the hornets nest she has stirred up.
Missed anything? Read my plot recap including that ending…
Watch the trailer for “Wuthering Heights”: