In the late 1700s, in the Yorkshire Moors, young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) lives with her alcoholic father (Martin Clunes).  When he brings a young orphan boy home from the streets to live with them, Cathy is delighted to have a new friend and brother (read: “pet”) whom she names Heathcliff (Owen Cooper).  The pair grow up together (Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi), and despite years of flirting with romance, Cathy ultimately marries her neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a textile merchant, to secure her social status.  Scorned, Heathcliff leaves the Moors, but when he returns years later, old flames and feuds alike rekindle as he begins to court Isabella (Alison Oliver), Linton’s ward, in an effort to further sabotage Cathy’s newfound life of privilege and peace. 

Writer/director Emerald Fennell adapts the singular work from English author, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; though she styles her modern title within quotation marks to invoke that this is adapting the experience of reading the text for that first time instead of a truly faithful translation from page to screen.  For Warner Brothers, the steamy title went wide across the Valentine’s day frame after a marketing campaign that desperately tried to save face and recalibrate audience expectations as to what kind of film they would be buying a ticket to.  While it may have prepared audiences for a less-than-faithful adaptation, the 136 minute film was also promised to be something far more sexy and scandalous than it actually was which still led to disappointment upon exit, albeit, of a different flavor. 

The film opens in darkness to the sounds of fabric rustling and heavy, labored breathing only to reveal them to be the dying gasps of a man being hung in the town square from an ill-tied noose.  In his struggle, a towns boy is quick to point out that the man has an erection, a sight which cinematographer Linus Sandgren cuts to so that we can be in on the joke as well.  Boys snicker. Mothers shield their daughters’ eyes.  Nuns find themselves a little hot under their habits.  Soon after, the town erupts into a bacchanal akin to the various orgies put to celluloid by Pier Paolo Pasolini or Federico Fellini.  It is from these early moments that the tonal mishmash begins to present itself as the action plays out against a strangely medieval styled square, but that lack of continuity and eventually blatant anachronistic quality ends up proving to be the exact pop-tone and feel that Fennell is looking to achieve through Suzie Davies’ production design, Charlotte Dirickx’s set decoration, and Jacqueline Durran’s costuming.  While this may not be the world which Brontë had envisioned when she penned her tale, this is, quotation marks and all, Fennell’s committed to cinematic take on the almost two centuries old novel. 

Though the story is arguably a hobbled love triangle presented as an ensemble piece. At its core it is a story of two people: Cathy and Heathcliff.  Fennell choses to synthesize this story down to the sweeping romance of it all, a choice that makes sense on the surface and is visually aided with stunning colors, specifically, the lusty red sky reminiscent of the Technicolor hues present in Gone with the Wind (1939) that here, backlight Heathcliff in the midst of what can only be described as his swashbuckling “Fabio era,” before his hiatus from the narrative. 

With Elordi’s Heathcliff stepping away for some time in the middle act, it makes Robbie’s Cathy the throughline for the film, as she is in the novel.  While she looks stunning in the costumes, the performance swings wildly across the spectrum of emotions and intensity, and though not actively bad, she clearly suffers from a lack of direction.  Some of this is a byproduct of Fennell’s loose spin on the material that focuses more on the tortured romance of the plot thus mudding the characters’ motivations come the final act.  Robbie does her best, but her bratty Cathy brings shades of her performance as Barbie (2023), but the material here does not excuse her more childish actions despite her age – a word used here simply to describe Cathy as a fully grown woman – as the Mattel vehicle did.  By framing this first, foremost, and almost entirely as a love story, her actions almost always are fueled by a desire to reunite with Heathcliff and the nastiness present is almost washed away safe for a few moments of a lover scorned. 

Elordi, similarly, fills the frame well physically with his sheer mass; which is to purposefully sidestep conversations about Heathcliff’s ambiguous-but-not-white race from the novel which has been written about extensively elsewhere, a casting choice made by many of the previous adaptations which consequently also carried less pre-release baggage than Fennell had saddled her own take with bearing.  With Timothée Chalamet too scrawny for the part, Elordi makes for an obvious choice of young, male “it” stars to smolder alongside Robbie.  Like his costar, he is dressed and framed in a way that audiences understand he is supposed to be sexy, and there are moments where that does shine through in the performance, but for much of the film he is trying to make sense of the same messy text that held back Robbie’s Cathy.  The root of his actions are a little simpler and easier to follow so when his performance still teeters the into some grey areas of comprehension in the final act, it is not as glaring of a fault since the real root of this problem stems from the pages of the script as he was never seen by the filmmaker to be as complex as Cathy. Elordi’s inability to make sense of such a singularly motivated character, in a way, does soften our reading of Robbie’s Cathy; a grace quickly undone by her scattershot cattiness, which in and of itself is in the spirit of the story.

“Wuthering Heights” is a popping vision and one that is certainly guided by a style and tone, however, it is hard to say if Fennell was truly in control when looking at what is on screen. Perhaps there was some studio interference involved since stuffy executives can still be caught blushing when confronted with the female gaze, but there is a sense that this film has tackled the material by simply scraping at the surface and digging no further. It begs the question, what would this property look like under the equally ferocious yet more introspective direction of Sofia Coppola? Not to conclude an analysis by wish casting a director, but where is the bitterness? Where is the scorn? Where is the danger? Where is the poison of blind rage at oneself and each other that will go on to infect generations of these two households? But eliding all of that and focusing back on what drew Fennell to this property in the first place, where is the love? Where is the smolder? She had already allowed Barry Keoghan to steal Heathcliff’s thunder by laying prostate and in anguish over a grave in Saltburn (2023), so at the risk of repeating herself here, Heathcliff simply gets to hold Cathy in his arms while she passes; clutching her, the object of his desire, defanged, dethroned, and at last his to hold. It is rather gross, and while his Prince Charming kiss will not bring her back to life, he still pleads that she return to haunt him, it is a wish supported neither by lust nor by sadomasochist guilt. This cathartic finale lands with a thud, finally revealing that plot which we were spying in on these past two plus hours was not steamy at all, just humid.