The dull desires of Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

In the grand tradition of Wuthering Heights movies—à la William Wyler’s 1939 melodrama, and Andrea Arnold’s more grounded and discomforting 2011 film—Fennell’s script focuses only on the first generation of the story, i.e. the tumultuous romance between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and her family’s servant, Heathcliff (Elordi), who she grew up alongside. It also combines characters and switches around numerous specifics, making for an initially intriguing work of transformation that plays less like a studied duplicate, and more like a dramatization of a novel half-remembered from when Fennell was a teen. However, in this artistic calculus, the details and readings she adds to the story aren’t nearly enough to make up for those she strips away, resulting in a film that might have benefitted from a more abstract approach than of which she’s capable (or charitably, interested in).

The opening five minutes are some of the most raw, exciting and surprising you’re likely to find in any major Hollywood movie. They create an unnerving audio-visual connection between sex and death, an invigorating thematic in-road that Fennell couches in a public execution, as eager onlookers (including an adolescent Catherine, played by Charlotte Mellington, and Owen Cooper as a young Heathcliff) absorb the spectacle in all its macabre grandeur. The blaring score by Anthony Willis, and the expressionistic, stage-like design of the Yorkshire Moors, frames Fennell’s Wuthering Heights as a kind of rock opera of the forbidden. Were this a short film unto itself, it would be a genuine masterpiece. But alas, it’s just another broken promise from the filmmaker behind the non-committal revenge farce of Promising Young Woman and the botched hedonism of hamstrung class satire Saltburn. On the plus side, at least Fennell doesn’t wait until the final act to let the air out of the room this time.

Although the film never touches on this nexus of death and sexuality ever again, some momentum remains by the time Robbie and Elordi usurp the lead roles, and engage in a will-they-won’t-they while dealing with Catherine’s cartoonishly abusive father. Robbie is perfectly fine in the part, though she can’t help but feel restrained by the film’s mechanical framing and assembly, geared more towards the function of dialogue than any emotional expression—let alone Catherine’s scenes of voyeurism of self-gratification Thankfully, Fennell’s interest in Elordi as an object of desire (a worthwhile holdover from Saltburn) leads to some alluring oddities the more she captures his chiselled contours. His scraggly hair, missing tooth and scarred skin practically make him an airport paperback model come to life, which is just as well, since Fennell claims to have cast him for his resemblance to an illustration of Heathcliff from her copy as a teenager. It’s also incredibly funny, in an endearing sort of way, to see the nearly 6-and-a-half-foot tall Elordi lumbering beneath the oppressively low ceilings of the Wuthering Heights homestead like a sexy, young Gandalf in the Shire.

Like Elordi’s role in Frankenstein, Heathcliff is practically a creature of fantasy, making his reappearance in the movie’s second half—after the couple is parted by circumstance—all the more revitalizing. However, that the film is in constant need of rejuvenation is a persistent problem. When Catherine meets her wealthy new neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), their dynamic—and therefore, much of the ensuing story—plays out in endless montage akin to an extended music video set to original tracks by Charli xcx. Across the film, you’ll see snazzy production designs and great gowns (beautiful gowns!), but seldom will you find a shred of recognizable humanity, or a coherent sense of time and its effects on people’s emotions.

In Wuthering Heights, the anguish of separation and longing is merely conceptual, presented as an incidental expectation of Victorian-era romance—a checked box, rather than the central conceit. When the leads briefly reunite, and things get hot and heavy, more montages ensue, as though Fennell were fixated on sexual release and the liberation of the illicit as something observed at a clinical distance, rather than experienced or fought for. The effect is a feeling of fast forward and slow motion all at once, where the individual images have flash and pizzazz, but their combination is defined by drudgery.

All the more vexing is the decision to cast in a seemingly race-blind manner, when the specter of race is constantly on the movie’s lips. Brontë’s descriptions of Heathcliff involve words like “gypsy” and “Lascar,” implying that he hails from a Romani or South Asian background, or perhaps some mixed heritage which Catherine can’t quite locate. Whatever the reality of Heathcliff’s ethnic origin (something we likely were not meant to know), this element of mystery is emblematic of the gothic romance genre, and its propensity to reflect (if not sublimate) lingering social anxieties. It also helps position the novel’s Heathcliff as an outsider to wealthy Victorian society, a key tenet of the character that goes missing whenever he’s played by a white performer. This has been the case many times over, though Arnold’s version notably cast Black actor James Howson, so it’s hardly a tradition that’s difficult to break.

Had the film been somehow absent of race (if such a thing is even possible), then the idea of yet another white Heathcliff may have been just another cumbersome inevitability. However, its casting and rewriting gestures constantly towards racial identity as a central tenet of various characters. Nelly Dean, Catherine’s housekeeper in the novel, is reframed here as the illegitimate daughter of a lord, cast off like a dirty secret. She’s played, in the film, by a pair of actresses of Vietnamese origin (Vy Nguyen as a teen, and later Hong Chau), introducing the idea of non-white ethnicity as an undesirable specter. This, too, is an idea that’s dropped as quickly as it’s introduced.

Nelly isn’t the only character played by an Asian actor, either. Edgar, the film’s well-to-do romantic rival, is played by the Pakistani British Latif, reframing the character as the very thing Heathcliff once was: an outsider and possible subject of the British Empire who rises impossibly through its ranks. And yet, he’s made a boring cutout, cast aside as quickly as Nelly (the book’s key narrator). Edgar’s sister in the novel, Isabella, is rewritten as his ward, which is a distinction without a difference in the grand scheme of things, though it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is because she’s played by a white actress, Alison Oliver, instead of someone South Asian like Latif.

Even setting aside the strange hypocrisy of when race does or does not matter in Fennell’s purview, Isabella is perhaps the movie’s strangest fixture, and one that reveals its biggest shortcomings around sexuality. Wuthering Heights was, in its time, both lauded and criticized for its unapologetic approach to self-destructive desire that veered into abusive territory, and any movie based on it would, in theory, need to fulfill the bare minimum of taking desire seriously—especially feminine desire. That Fennell occasionally shoots scenes of kink and masturbation observed from afar is a nice enough gesture, but in tandem with the movie skipping past most of its sensuality, what remains most irksome in this adaptation is the manner in which Isabella’s passions (which is to say: that she has any at all) is treated as a punchline. She’s portrayed as a squawking, over-eager debutante—a scorned archetype whose very existence seems to make her unworthy of thoughtful consideration on the same level as Catherine, especially where own consent of the forbidden is concerned. (A similar lens is applied to Edgar too, whenever the camera affords him the dignity of a close up.)

In Wuthering Heights, gestures of yearning and obsession are only rendered with a steady artistic hand if deemed worthy by way of authorship—which, in this case, aligns unfortunately with the outdated traditions of Hollywood, and the inevitability of conventionally attractive white leads being the only deserving locus of serious cinema. Atop the numerous faults of this approach (primarily, as matter of unsavory optics), it speaks to an incompleteness within Fennell’s adaptation, whether by intent or inability, to imbue the story with a more multifaceted humanity that would have made its drama between Catherine and Heathcliff more difficult or more rigorous. Instead, what we’re left with is a series of vast, expressionistic backdrops that never feel grounded in the agony or ecstasy theoretically driving the story, as its beautiful leads struggle against a world that seldom constrains them with a shred of vigor or vehemence, eliciting little more than a shrug.

For all its fiery flourishes, the result is dull as a doorknob, and just as cold.