Wuthering Heights Review: Overheated and Greedy Adaptation Guarantees Bad Dreams at Night | film

eMerald Fennell revitalizes camp as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on a windswept Yorkshire moor in a fashionable 20-page spread of relentless silliness, with shells being ripped to shreds and a smack of raunchy BDSM. Margot Robbie’s Cathy at one point secretly heads to the moor for a hilarious amount of self-indulgence – although, sadly, there are no boldly intercut scenes of Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, in a thirst trap, simultaneously doing the same thing in the stable, while muttering hoarsely in his Yerkshire accent.

This then is Vinyl’s Wuthering Heights, or rather “Wuthering Heights”; The title appears arched between inverted commas, although the postmodern irony seems meaningless. Cathy is a belle who trembles in the presence of Heathcliff, who is himself a moody, long-haired, bearded stranger, as if Scarlett O’Hara would melt in the arms of Charles Manson. However, he became largely Darcyfied later on, sporting a shorter, more attractive hairstyle, and his thin shirt never dried out.

As a child, young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Millington) is a consummate beauty queen, immersed in her father’s loud, twinkling-eyed old angel, a role in which Martin Clunes stars throughout the film. Fennell incidentally eliminated the character of Cathy’s older brother Hindley from the book (along with his wife and son) and reassigned the father to Hindley’s destructive drinking and gambling; Fennell also, in keeping with the traditional WH adaptation, loses the second half of the novel from The Next Generation, which revolves around Cathy, Hindley, and Heathcliff’s adult children. It also very weakly erases the issue of Heathcliff’s dark skin – perhaps those inverted commas are intended to ignore issues of ‘authenticity’.

On a lordly whim, Mr. Earnshaw rescues a young man from the streets of Liverpool while he is there on business, and adopts him as Cathy’s half-brother; That, of course, is Heathcliff, played as a pinched-faced boy by Owen Cooper (the young star of the award-winning Netflix drama “Teen”). They run wild together as children, but as adults of the aristocracy and servant class respectively, there seems no way to consummate or even acknowledge their feelings for each other.

The family’s fortunes were in tatters, Cathy married her wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), breaking Heathcliff’s heart, who left; He returns rich a few years later and has a romantic relationship with Cathy, who knows the truth about why he left. When he ends up spitefully marrying Edgar’s humble sister Isabella (played by Alison Oliver, entertainingly channeling Sophie Thompson). Fennell highlights his cruelty towards her by portraying Isabella as a smiling, approving sub.

As for the know-it-all housekeeper Nelly Dean (played by Hong Chow), she is the most complex character in the book, the one through whose eyes one can see almost all of the action. Nelly is English literature’s uncrowned queen of unreliable narrators, and the inciting witness to the central disastrous misunderstanding that destroys Heathcliff and Cathy’s happiness. Interestingly, Fennell has Cathy confront Nelly on this point. At some point, of course, things get real and a tsunami of tears is released; It’s all in a frenetic, exhausting Baz Luhrmann-esque style and the film starts out resembling a 136-minute video of Charli xcx songs on the soundtrack.

Wuthering Heights doesn’t quite have the live-action influence of Fennell’s previous films Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, or indeed, Andrea Arnold’s flawed, brilliantly primitive retelling of Brontë’s 2011 novel, which truly believes in the emotional truth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. For Fennell, it feels like a luxurious pose of careless abandon. It’s semi-sexy, pseudo-romantic, then artificially sad, a club night full of fake emotions.