Wuthering Heights is a bodice-ripper for the OnlyFans generation
Wuthering Heights | Dir. Emerald Fennell | ★★★★★
Saltburn director Emerald Fennell sets out her stall in the opening seconds of her “Wuthering Heights”. We hear rhythmic grunting over a blank screen. But these aren’t the sounds of copulation, rather those of a man being hanged by the neck before a baying crowd, the scene climaxing with… well, his climax. Sex and death, the two enduring fascinations of Fennell’s movie, spliced together in a scene guaranteed to alienate any purists.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” – note the quotation marks – is Emily Bronte’s novel filtered through the unreality of a dream, less an adaptation than a gothic fairytale based upon the same loose set of events. It’s like Fennell didn’t re-read the novel, instead holding a seance to summon forth its terrible essence, dragging the resulting images kicking and screaming and humping onto the screen with all the stylised energy of a music video (a glorious soundtrack by Charli xcx – part dirge, part pulsing electro – helps in this regard).
In this telling, Wuthering Heights isn’t a lonely old estate on the Yorkshire Moors, it’s a nightmare castle hemmed in by a crown of jagged rocks, the last cottage before you reach Mordor. The stream that meanders past the estate runs bright crimson. The manor itself is a place of darkness and ruin, like it was hewn from a single block of obsidian. When Cathy moves into the neighbouring estate it’s like passing through the looking glass into a world where every surface is mirrored or bejeweled or glazed.
This is a film that revels in flesh. The camera lingers voyeuristically over Heathcliff’s scars and Cathy’s perfect complexion. Cathy’s bedroom walls are painted the colour of her skin, complete with moles and veins. There is a fireplace made up of hands grasping their way up the wall. If Guillermo del Toro directed Wuthering Heights, it would probably look something like this.
Gone is the labyrinthine family tree that requires a diagram to properly understand: this is the story of Cathy and Heathcliff and their doomed, beautiful, terrible, sexy love affair. Characters and timelines are entirely expunged, while others have their roles changed so much they are essentially new creations. Any students hoping to watch this in lieu of reading the novel will soon come unstuck.
The beginning of the novel is thrown out entirely: it starts not with boring old Mr Lockwood but with Wuthering Heights’ drunken, abusive custodian Mr Earnshaw returning home with a strange boy. His only living child, Cathy – poor Hindley doesn’t exist in this version – immediately falls for the lad, whom she names Heathcliff after her “dead brother”.
This is an extremely horny film. Spit and mucus and fluid seep from every frame. We see fingers slick with egg yolk and close-ups of snails weaving sticky trails. Everybody is constantly sopping wet and it’s only partly because of the weather. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi – both magnetic, the camera drinking in their every pore – spend half the movie with their fingers in each other’s mouths. If your goal is to watch beautiful people shagging, “Wuthering Heights” will fill your bingo card many times over.
But it’s also a film of unusual beauty, every shot designed for maximum impact. Whether it’s Cathy walking across the moors, filmed from above with her wedding train billowing absurdly behind her, or Mr Earnshaw lying dead beside a mountain of empty bottles that reaches to the ceiling, it’s brilliantly, meticulously put together.
The backlash against this adaptation started before shooting even began – how dare someone treat Emily this way! – and I can’t help but wonder if Fennell doubled down on her vision, tearing up what remained of the novel in favour of this surreal, impressionistic, singular film.
Her debut A Promising Young Woman – a harrowing #MeToo story – was born from online culture and her follow-up, Saltburn, became the online event of 2023. So it’s fitting that “Wuthering Heights” takes a Victorian novel and turns it into the most controversial film of the year, the source of endless Discourse by people on The Internet. To hell with the doubters: “Wuthering Heights” is a sublime carnival of excess, a bodice-ripper for the OnlyFans generation that stuffs you fit to burst but somehow leaves you wanting more.