Written by Louis Pelingen
Spoiler warning
When she was 14, Emerald Fennell got her hands on reading her very first book – Emily Brontë’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights. It tells the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, the two main leads, who have fallen in love throughout the novel as it unfolds across heavy themes of abuse, race, fractured social class, and other crushing emotions that spurred a thorny conversation surrounding the plot that these two characters are heavily involved in. Of course, given the enthralled stasis of impressionable teenagers, the overarching sternness is not what captivated her. To her, the gratuitously romantic and sexual appetite that Catherine and Heathcliff have shown is an important emotional becoming for her entire life. It’s a life-changing moment for the young Emerald Fennell, and how that ragged emotionality eventually sprinkles over the way she processes her films later down the line. Messy and tangled, for better and for worse.
Given such a moment in her life, she’s not about to deny the chance of adapting that classic novel… Only if she makes it her own. Throughout the entire process, she’d immediately acknowledge the difficulty of adapting the novel alongside the fact that she won’t end up with the definitive version of it, a state of self-awareness that reflects in her creative ethos. Hence, instead of leaning towards the novel’s accuracy, which explains the decisions she made later on, she essentially looked at her initial experience of first going through the novel and made it the basis of how she leans into her adaptation.
Now, all of this has led to her version of “Wuthering Heights” – double quotations intentionally included – as this is her overall reading of the story, satiating a personal indulgence where her emotions imagine Wuthering Heights as a power fantasy, full of ornate stylism and overtly romantic hubris. Going so far as to the revered pop mind of Charli XCX, the immense star power of Jacob Elordi, Margot Robbie, and Hong Chau, then transforming all of it based on that starry-eyed view of her younger self.
For her, the love between Catherine and Heathcliff is what makes the novel a sticking point, and she emphasizes such pathos across tasteful camera frameworks, decorated costumes, and impassioned color palettes as the plot unfolds. Deliberately painting away Catherine’s wild expressionistic spirit whose love becomes sweeping, yet becomes a testing point when it now revolves around the poor servant Heathcliff and the rich elite Edgar – her husband, whom she swoons over in the beginning. Such love becomes the connective tissue that embroils the talking points of class, sex, and intensity. All of which has tangled into the layers of jealousy between Isabella, the betrayal with Nelly, and the conflicted yearning with Heathcliff that tumbles down later across the film.
As it develops, for a tale of class divide, sexual appetites, and impassioned romanticism, those potent ideas gets tossed in the air as the film starts shedding away its grandeur to present something less evocative, not because of Fennell leaning hard onto those romantic affectations that drastically cuts away the deep-seated thorniness of the novel, but how all this stylism simultaneously pops and deflates. This approach becomes distractingly baffling, as the set design and cinematography become garish, boorish, and lackluster overall. Splitting hairs between emphasizing her pompous vision and reminding of the weight that the plot ultimately carries, a creative choice that creates a push-and-pull conflict throughout the film. It’s saturated, but also understated. The lighting plays into chiaroscuro techniques, but it doesn’t evoke immense highlights as it gets subsumed by the frequent gloomy mist. Additionally, the pacing spends the entirety of its runtime frequently dragging to a dull slow burn, mostly due to plenty of lousy structural moments where Charli XCX’s original songs are placed on top of these mostly fleeting montage sequences, letting these songs tell what is being felt, rather than developing these scenes to speak more.
The problems only deepen, mostly coming through two things. The first one is the performances. For as heavy-hitter as she is, Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Catherine only works wonders when her character gets emotionally intricate; yet throughout, her stately expressiveness does not really play over the initially wild, giddy spirit of Catherine, nor the eventual winding timidness when she starts to starve herself. It becomes a confounding factor as the rest of her main cast performances – notably Hong Chau, and Alison Oliver – completely outshine her, and surprisingly so.
Her fellow lead, Jacob Elordi, also falls weirdly short as Heathcliff. He portrays him tastefully as one-note, an eyebrow-raising moment as his character develops more with spite and terror, expressions that Elordi didn’t fully capture. He does play Heathcliff’s alluring beauty and mystique, but not exactly much when he is in a state of pent-up anger or desperation, essential characteristics that are somehow emphasized as the story progresses.
Yet the main issue here is that Fennell’s personal objectives in her version of “Wuthering Heights” just do not translate as a whole. The aspect of sexual pleasure and sadomasochism becomes a tame gesture, with the former frolicking across close-ups of snail trails, egg yolks, and sweaty backs that would timidly expose montages of healthy and unhealthy pleasures, and the latter minutely utilized as a fragile plot device for Heathcliff to turn into a darker side of himself. Both of which also plaster an underwhelming portrayal of the class divide, where the poor are seen as sexual deviants and the rich consider themselves to be pure. Its intrigue only had its transgressive development when Heathcliff manages to forcibly marry Isabella Linton, both of which tries to one-up each other through sexual domination amidst extremely vanilla kinks.
This leads to Isabella seeing him as a monster. A creature. A devil in disguise. All descriptors that expose who Heathcliff has become from his life experiences: a man who has dealt with physical abuse, emotionally ruined by how he is perceived for his status as a servant, and gets to have his heart broken further due to his clashes with Catherine despite the heartfelt revelations that they’ve gone through. Yet such means to evoke empathy for his tragic experiences didn’t stick the landing. Without further sharpening the connection of the class divide with the sensual desires, this puts a sour note on Heathcliff as a whole. It devolves the intent of seeing him as a romantic who felt like desire is the only tool he has; instead, he is seen as nothing but a studded brute who is aimlessly careless with his desires, and it just makes him less interesting as a character.
The build-up of his heel turn from the last 45 to 30 minutes led to the adaptation getting close to working. The emotional stakes are now in full view when Catherine clutches her fallible emotions upon the return of Heathcliff, leading to sequences of power dynamics, tempting infidelity, and evocative dramatics that only ensnare the tension across the main cast of characters. It’s the only moment where Fennell’s overall vision hits its stride, as it finally plays into the evocatively raving emotions where the tension fully erupts, a much-needed shift from the willowy romantic ploys that diffuse the deeper character dynamics of Catherine and Heathcliff. It results in an observation of their relationship that is emotionally empty, and only grips towards the very end. It’s a tragic attempt at crystallizing their recklessly tangible love.
While it needs to be said that her way of adapting Wuthering Heights into “Wuthering Heights” is no means a bad idea – at the end of the day, she does get what she wanted out of this – the implementations of stylistic flair only trickles down to concepts executed with shallow chains of passion, wearing pop decadence that underscores its exorbitant flaws. It is tasteful as it is airy, memorable as it is forgetful, and elegant as it is hollow. An attempt to turn the novel through the eyes of her romantically impassioned young self, but it becomes less desirable than what Fennell initially imagined. It may have stayed with you through all its fancy decorations, yet it only reaches its height when it is about to shed its glamour, and leaves you with an empty void that can’t be satiated.
