More than a decade ago, The New Yorker published a piece titled "Can Wuthering Heights Work Onscreen?," in which my now-colleague Joshua Rothman argued that Emily Brontë's classic is beloved "not just for its romance but also for its strangeness, its intensity, and its violence." These qualities, he noted, are often left out of the many films and miniseries the book has inspired, which tend to reduce the story to the doomed romance of Catherine and Heathcliff.
The extravagant new movie "Wuthering Heights," written and directed by the English filmmaker Emerald Fennell, is very much in this vein; it could be the most reductive version of this material ever made. But I can't say I was ever bored. As she demonstrated in her wild satirical thriller Saltburn, from 2023, Fennell cares little for subtlety, and here she's made an ode to mad, passionate excess.
You could say she tells the story in broad brushstrokes, but I don't think she's even using a brush — more like bright red spray paint. And she's cast two stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, as a Catherine and Heathcliff you won't soon forget, even if their love affair is ultimately more photogenic than it is deeply moving.
It begins in the late 18th century, around the time that the young Catherine Earnshaw, who likes to run wild on the Yorkshire moors, gets a new companion named Heathcliff, a scruffy urchin who comes to live with her and her father at their house, Wuthering Heights.
Years later, and now played by Robbie and Elordi, Catherine and Heathcliff are extremely close, to the point of sharing a tense, quasi-incestuous attraction. It's clear they love each other, even when Catherine expresses her interest in Edgar Linton, a wealthy aristocrat who's moved into a magnificent estate nearby.
Catherine ends up marrying Edgar, played here by Shazad Latif. Heathcliff storms off in a fury, only to return several years later, with a fortune of his own and a fierce desire to either reclaim Catherine or have his revenge. He inflames her jealousy by setting his sights on Edgar's impressionable young ward, Isabella — that's Alison Oliver, giving the movie's sharpest performance.
Up to a point, this is how past adaptations — including the classic versions directed by William Wyler and Luis Buñuel — have unfolded. But Fennell wants to make the story her own, by infusing it with a hot-and-heavy sexuality that you don't typically see in a Brontë adaptation. Catherine and Heathcliff do a lot more romping in the rain than usual, in scenes that Fennell stages for wicked laughs as well as earnest emotion.
But it's precisely in the realm of emotion that this "Wuthering Heights" falters. Elordi and Robbie are fine actors, and they do what they can to give this overheated movie a core of real feeling. But they are often overwhelmed by the sheer gargantuan excess of the filmmaking. The movie may be set in the 18th century, but Fennell draws on a wealth of contemporary inspirations, starting with the soundtrack, which features several moody songs by the pop star Charli xcx. The production design and the costumes are full of outré touches, from the bright red acrylic floor in one room of Catherine and Edgar's home to the Met Gala-ready gowns that Catherine wears in scene after scene. She changes outfits so often that Robbie at times seems to be playing Barbie all over again.
There's a reason for all this anachronism; it's Fennell's way of saying that Catherine and Heathcliff's love story is so powerful that it transcends its period setting. But for all her bold choices, there are aspects of this "Wuthering Heights" that remain hidebound and conventional, including its treatment of race.
Over the years, there's been much debate over the subject of Heathcliff's ethnicity. Brontë's book famously describes him as a "dark-skinned gypsy," and he's often been held up as one of the few protagonists of color in Victorian literature — not that that's kept him from being played by one white actor after another, including Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy and now Elordi.
One under-appreciated exception is Andrea Arnold's 2012 version, which features two Black actors, Solomon Glave and James Howson, as the younger and older Heathcliff. Casting choices aside, Arnold's version is pretty much the antithesis of Fennell's: somber, downbeat and grimly realistic. It's a tougher but ultimately more affecting movie. And with "Wuthering Heights" fever having set in, now is as good a time as any to seek it out.
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