Wuthering Heights Review: This Bold Reinvention of Emily Brontë’s Novel Is ‘sexy, Dramatic and Swoonily Romantic’

Reinventing Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights review: This bold reinvention of Emily Brontë’s novel is ‘sexy, dramatic and swooningly romantic’. You might think this is new, but… it’s not. The trailer alone evoked so much hand-wringing from Brontë purists that the film became divisive sight unseen.

Director Emerald Fennell, known for her scathing revenge drama Promising Young Woman and the lush, bitter story of class and obsession, Saltburn, brings her own spin to the classic.

Her approach is an extravagant swirl: sexy, dramatic, occasionally comic, and swooningly romantic. Not always.

Stylized and Sensual

The film opens with a jolt of violence, invented by Fennell, that the young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) watches with wide-eyed excitement. Robbie turns up in the first of many bright red-and-white dresses, and her performance is magnificent, making Cathy wild and selfish but with a conscience, and an innocence beneath her sense of entitlement.

But Fennell’s approach is far from faithful to the original book – and that’s the point. The childhood scenes are bracing, but the film quickly moves on. There is a lot of standing in the rain and wind, kissing in the rain and wind, and just rain and wind on the Yorkshire moors.

Modern Touches

Fennell laces the 19th-Century setting with contemporary touches, from its costumes fit for an Oscar red carpet to its sexual frankness. A flesh-coloured wall is based on a scan of Robbie’s skin, veins and all. But under it all Fennell channels something essential in the book – the corrosive behaviour that can result from thwarted desire.

Jealousy, anger, and vengeance are as natural to Cathy and Heathcliff as their endless passion for each other. If you embrace the film’s audacious style and think of it as a reinvention not an adaptation, this bold, artful Wuthering Heights is utterly absorbing.

Characters and Performances

Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) embodies dashing, bad-boy energy, even when stuck with a stringy-haired wig. He’s more than just a shirtless, sweaty hunk; he reveals how defensive and easily wounded he is, how he resents his status as a servant.

Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), the rich man Cathy marries, is attractive and devoted. She likes him; he’s just not Heathcliff. Alison Oliver gives a standout, lively performance as Isabella, Edgar’s grown yet childish ward, who adores Cathy and creepily makes a doll with strands of Cathy’s actual hair.

Over-the-Top Choices

The film’s over-the-top choices sometimes seem kitschy: Heathcliff rides on horseback against a bright orange sky, long hair flying in the wind as if he escaped from the cover of a romance novel. But overall Fennell uses stylised images well. After Heathcliff leaves, an overhead view shows Cathy slumped on the floor so that all we see is her billowing red skirt, her despair and grief revealed in a single shot.

It’s all steamy but discreetly shot.

When his jealousy turns more cruel than ever, though, and he manipulates the innocent Isabella into becoming his chattel, the change is far too abrupt. At the end, we flash back to young Heathcliff, who says, “I’ll love you ’til the day I die, and after”. But a line just as important comes earlier, in the adult Heathcliff’s dark, passionate plea to Cathy, capturing the vehemence beneath this film’s dazzling surface: “Kiss me and let us both be damned.”

★★★★☆ — If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List – a handpicked selection of features, videos, and can’t-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, on Facebook and Instagram.