"Wuthering Heights"

The Quotes Around the Moors

I knew exactly what kind of movie we were dealing with when Warner Bros. gently requested that critics refer to Emerald Fennell’s latest provocation with quotation marks. It’s not an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel; it's `"Wuthering Heights"`. The punctuation is a shield, a preemptive defense against the literary purists who might expect, I don't know, actual historical context or the second half of the book. And maybe that's fair. Fennell isn’t interested in faithful translation. She’s interested in the sweat, the spit, and the sheer, chaotic spectacle of two terrible people who can't leave each other alone.



The opening scene plants a flag in the mud. We get a public hanging where a condemned man develops a post-mortem erection, a morbid anatomical reality that the crowd gawks at. But watch Cathy (played first by a younger actress, then by Margot Robbie). She isn't horrified. She's fascinated. Delighted, even. It’s a jarring, darkly funny intro that declares arousal and danger are essentially the same thing in this universe. Fennell (whose *Saltburn* already proved her affinity for sticky, bodily shock value) covers everything in a tactile grime—snail slime streaking a window, fresh pig blood staining a dress. The film desperately wants to feel dangerous. But I'm not sure it actually is.



The central problem isn't the heavy-handed kink or the fact that Robbie is playing a teenager like a petulant, wide-eyed doll. It's the void where Heathcliff's identity should be. The novel hinges on his racial ambiguity—the dark-haired foundling discovered near the Liverpool slave-trading port—which cements his status as a perpetual, ostracized outsider. Casting a towering, conventionally handsome white actor like Jacob Elordi fundamentally defangs that social friction. He’s got the brooding scowl down, sure. His physical presence is imposing enough to blot out the sun. But without that deep-seated alienation, his cruelty just feels like a rich boy's tantrum. As Vulture's Alison Willmore accurately diagnosed, the film operates on a "smooth-brained sensuality." It looks incredible, but there's nobody home.



For a movie so aggressively obsessed with sex, the actual intimacy feels strangely mechanical. (TIME magazine noted that the lovers' encounters "bump along methodically, PowerPoint-style.") Fennell drops Brontë's multi-generational tragedy of inherited trauma fully, choosing instead to focus on a hyper-stylized romance that plays out like a 19th-century teenage fever dream. Hong Chau, as the long-suffering companion Nelly, does her best to ground the absurdity, watching the manic lovers with a heavy, judgmental sigh that often mirrors my own. I admire the sheer audacity of what Fennell attempted here. But by turning this classic into a lavish, horny music video, she forgot that the real terror of Wuthering Heights isn't the heat between the lovers. It's the freezing, inescapable cold of the world that made them.