Wuthering Heights: Emerald Fennell tries and fails to impress

[ad_1] You come right into a film primarily based on Wuthering Heights with sure expectations.

Emerald Fennell has been clear that she considers her “Wuthering Heights” — pointed quote marks and all — to be a fantasia, not a straight adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. “It might solely ever be an try and take a tiny piece of the e book and make sense of it,” she said in a recent interview . Nonetheless, as a matter of fundamental reality, Wuthering Heights is a narrative of passionate, obsessive love between two monstrous sadists, and Fennell’s model of the story is so very showy about how attractive and darkish it plans to be. So you'll assume that the tiny piece of the story she’s making an attempt to make sense of could be the half in regards to the attractive sociopaths in love.

Fennell’s movie opens with the sounds of a physique writhing in what the viewers at first believes to be intercourse, however quickly learns are literally demise throes. Its ostentatiously perverse manufacturing design is full of rooms wallpapered with flesh-colored leather-based, full with veins and moles; lengthy, lingering closeups of moist slug trails; characters outfitted in full crimson latex skirts or clear cellophane material. It's a movie that palpably desires to be regarded as kinky — a storytelling mode that ought to mesh properly with Brontë’s bleak, cruel world.

Brontë punishes her readers for even liking her characters. Its most charismatic and compelling characters, the doomed lovers Heathcliff and Catherine, are additionally two of its biggest monsters. Feral and violent, Brontë’s Heathcliff and Catherine wreck lives and inflict wanton quantities of ache for the sheer sport of all of it, however in addition they love one another overwhelmingly, ferociously, sufficient to tear down the world throughout one another. Studying about them, it’s each troublesome to want them nicely and inconceivable to not really feel that they actually ought to be collectively. That contradiction is what creates the stress that powers the reader via this brutal, bleak e book, with all its distress and squalor.

But puzzlingly, Fennell chooses to delete this supply of stress from her model of the story. Her Catherine and Heathcliff are stunning innocent horndogs, to the purpose that they resemble the stunning personality-free characters in Nicholas Sparks movies, beset by tragedies for which they maintain completely no accountability. Fennell neuters her monsters, and that's the one fault from which Wuthering Heights can by no means get better.

The perverse energy of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

<img alt="Robbie and Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff, mid-clinch on the moors." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T1-0039_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Robbie and Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff, mid-clinch on the moors. Courtesy Warner Bros. Photos

Heathcliff and Catherine don't start their lives as villains. In Brontë’s novel, they're first uncared for youngsters. Catherine is the spoiled daughter of a rich, remoted household on the English moors, and Heathcliff is the racially ambiguous foundling her father brings house from a go to to the town. At first, the pair stay as brother and sister; they're educated collectively and, after their classes, run throughout the moors like animals, contemplating “the after punishment” to be “a mere factor to snort at.” However after Catherine’s father dies and her brother Hindley takes over the home, he jealously demotes Heathcliff from fellow brother to servant, leaving him uneducated and impoverished.

Did Brontë have extra tales to inform?

Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis at age 30, abandoning solely Wuthering Heights and her poetry. However students have lengthy been haunted by the chance that she might need been engaged on a second novel when she died. In a letter despatched shortly earlier than her demise, Brontë’s writer wrote that he “shall have nice pleasure in making preparations in your second novel,” and that Brontë is “fairly proper to not let it go earlier than the world till nicely glad with it.” If Brontë was corresponding together with her writer a few second e book, the pondering goes, she should have been nicely into it.

So what occurred to this mysterious manuscript? No hint of the novel has ever been discovered. The persistent, never-confirmed rumor, nevertheless, is that Brontë’s sister Charlotte, of Jane Eyre fame, destroyed the manuscript to protect Emily’s reputation . Victorian readers had been shocked sufficient by the bleakness of Wuthering Heights . No matter was within the second e book might need been much more brutal.

The tragedy of the novel all unspools from that first act of abuse. When Catherine comes of age as a member of genteel society, she decides that though she loves Heathcliff, she can't marry him as a result of he's socially beneath her. As an alternative she marries a wealthy however weak man who she will be able to dominate and management. On the identical time, she covers up her intense and passionate nature, guaranteeing her matches of rage solely ever occur at strategically chosen moments.

Heathcliff, heartbroken, disappears for 3 years after which returns mysteriously wealthy, polished, and decided to actual his revenge. He drives Hindley into an alcoholic despair that finally results in his demise, after which takes custody of Hindley’s home and little one and units about degrading every as vividly as attainable. He marries Catherine’s sister-in-law and abuses each her and their little one. A mere hundred pages into the novel, he has turn into so sadistic that he's strangling a pet with a handkerchief.

Catherine, in her flip, is violent together with her servants, her husband, and her sister-in-law at any time when she feels she will be able to get away with it. She eggs Heathcliff on, delighting in his rages. “He’s extra myself than I'm,” she says, which means, amongst different issues, that each one the monstrous urges Catherine should disguise and sublimate in herself, Heathcliff is free to enact. After Catherine dies, Heathcliff goes to nice lengths to attract her daughter into his clutches, the place he can rage at her.

By the point Catherine and Heathcliff are adults, they're so palpably terrible that it's troublesome to look after them in any respect. However Brontë dares you to maintain studying, lavishing her most stunning prose on these wretched, depressing folks. “No matter souls are manufactured from, his and mine are the identical,” Catherine says of Heathcliff as she resolves to not marry him. “Be with me at all times — take any type — drive me mad!” cries out Heathcliff to Catherine’s ghost after she dies.

There's such vitality to their characters that the story goes flat on the web page at any time when they aren't there, terrorizing everybody round them. They're the explanation the world of Wuthering Heights is so terrible and oppressive, and the contradiction between their ardour and their cruelty is what makes the e book dynamic and unforgettable. With out that stress, it might by no means have remained beloved or related for lengthy because it has.

<img alt="Hong Chua as Nelly Dean in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights." data-chromatic="ignore" loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-nimg="fill" class="mvmjsc0" style="position:absolute;height:100%;width:100%;left:0;top:0;right:0;bottom:0;color:transparent;background-size:cover;background-position:50% 50%;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-image:url("data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' %3E%3Cfilter id='b' color-interpolation-filters='sRGB'%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3CfeColorMatrix values='1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 100 -1' result='s'/%3E%3CfeFlood x='0' y='0' width='100%25' height='100%25'/%3E%3CfeComposite operator='out' in='s'/%3E%3CfeComposite in2='SourceGraphic'/%3E%3CfeGaussianBlur stdDeviation='20'/%3E%3C/filter%3E%3Cimage width='100%25' height='100%25' x='0' y='0' preserveAspectRatio='none' style='filter: url(%23b);' href='data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mN8+R8AAtcB6oaHtZcAAAAASUVORK5CYII='/%3E%3C/svg%3E")" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, (max-width: 1023px) 50vw, 700px" srcset="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=256 256w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=376 376w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=384 384w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=415 415w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=480 480w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=540 540w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=640 640w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=750 750w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=828 828w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1080 1080w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1200 1200w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1440 1440w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=1920 1920w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2048 2048w, https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400 2400w" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/rev-1-WHE-T2-0053_High_Res_JPEG.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400"/> Hong Chua as Nelly Dean in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Courtesy Warner Bros. Photos

In Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” the good monster shouldn't be Heathcliff or Catherine, and even Catherine’s brother Hindley. (Fennell chooses to mix Hindley with Catherine’s father in a wonderfully cheap consolidation of characters.) It’s Catherine’s maid, Nelly.

In Brontë’s novel, Nelly Dean is without doubt one of the central narrators. She grows up with Catherine and Heathcliff and works as a maid in Catherine’s home after her marriage, with a detailed view of all of the horrors which are enacted there. We study Catherine and Heathcliff’s story as a result of Nelly is recounting it to Heathcliff’s new tenant, in order that the entire novel turns into one story nested inside one other, in a type of matryoshka doll of trauma.

Nelly, tartly smart and with little tolerance for her employers’ dramatics, is ostensibly one of many few sympathetic characters in a novel containing valuable few of them — Charlotte Brontë described her as “a specimen of true benevolence and homely constancy.” However there’s an ambiguity to her storytelling that has led some readers to think about her an unreliable narrator, and maybe in the end the villain of the entire piece. She retains silent when she learns that Heathcliff has disastrously misheard Catherine, with the eventual consequence that he runs away, and she or he refuses to take Catherine’s ultimate sickness significantly till it's too late for her to be saved. Would issues have gotten so unhealthy, some readers demand, if it weren’t for Nelly?

Fennell alerts early on that she will probably be following this studying. She inserts a brand new scene during which Catherine’s eventual husband, Edgar Linton, listens to Isabella Linton (in Brontë’s story, Linton’s sister; in Fennell’s, his ward) clarify the plot of Romeo and Juliet . “I don’t actually just like the nurse,” Isabella declares, earlier than happening to argue that each one the useless demise and bloodshed of Romeo and Juliet might have been averted if solely Juliet’s nurse had been extra accountable.

Drawing parallels between Juliet’s nurse and Catherine’s maid, Fennell comes down exhausting on Nelly over the course of her movie. Any mistake Nelly makes is recast as a mean-spirited and deliberate act of vengeance on people who find themselves hotter and extra attention-grabbing than she is. They're additionally, in Fennell’s model of the story, whiter than Nelly — Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is erased whereas Nelly turns into a lady of coloration, in a surprisingly nasty little bit of not-quite-color-blind casting. On the finish of the movie, Edgar Linton declares the maid a “torturer” and condemns her for the trend hiding inside her.

The entire thing is oddly paying homage to Fennell’s vapid Saltburn , during which the wealthy and exquisite are revealed on the finish to be virtuous and proper, whereas the poor are scheming social climbers. Fennell has a passion for subversion, however someway she appears to at all times find yourself subverting her strategy to essentially the most conservative place attainable.

It’s completely attainable to come back to the conclusion that Nelly is unreliable and even villainous inside an excellent religion studying of Brontë’s novel. One potential consequence of such a studying that's congruent with the emotional tone of the novel may be to take away the consolation of a totally likable character from this harsh, bleak panorama, and to permit ourselves to expertise the horror of a world during which everyone seems to be ruthless and depraved out for themselves. Fennell, as a substitute, makes use of it as an excuse to disclose that Catherine and Heathcliff bear no fault in any respect for what befalls them, and that all the tragedy was a results of Nelly’s meddling — a type of Joker apologia for them, if it had been already Batman canon that the Joker was fairly attractive and glamorous and had a tragic backstory.

Watching Fennell’s “ Wuthering Heights ,” there is no such thing as a level at which you're requested to take a seat with the discomfort of discovering a monster extra attention-grabbing and full of life than their prey. At no level are you requested to take a look at somebody doing one thing horrible, and keep in mind that they was a baby who was handled badly.

Brontë’s Cathy beats her servants, her horses, her husband. She flies into uncontrollable rages and plots to destroy her enemies. Fennell’s Cathy presents the occasional imply woman putdown, swiftly belied by her stunning tear-swollen eyes, which reveal her true purity of coronary heart. She shouldn't be a lot passionate and offended as she is pragmatic and just a little bit petty.

Brontë’s Heathcliff slowly and systematically bankrupts his abuser after which ruins the person’s son. Fennell’s Heathcliff kindly cares for his adopted father in his damaged previous age. Brontë’s Heathcliff tortures the feckless Isabella’s pet, then seduces her and abuses her and their little one. Fennell’s Heathcliff largely stares in confusion as Isabella writhes in pleasure on the tip of a canine’s leash, having not solely enthusiastically consented to the remedy, however in reality instigated it. When onscreen Catherine tells Isabella that Heathcliff will eat her alive, the second feels absurd: The viewers is aware of by this level that Isabella is an oversexed weirdo who will do no matter she desires with reserved, pliant Heathcliff. (In reality, she does.)

No adaptation have to be completely devoted to its supply textual content with the intention to be good, however it has to do one thing . It has to have an vitality, a supply of stress, a purpose to exist. However having excised the stress of Brontë’s novel from her movie, Fennell replaces it with completely nothing. As an alternative, you're requested solely to observe stunning folks interact in delicate BDSM play upon the gorgeous moors, after which die via no fault of their very own.

All that gleefully perverse manufacturing design made guarantees, and she or he follows via on completely none of them. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reaches no heights in any respect.