Movie Review: Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a novel that doesn’t need any added shock. It is hysterical, cruel, and in Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff it gives us lovers for a lifetime. That was all Emily Brontë. Her book shaped the fantasies of generations of young women.

Emerald Fennell, queen of trauma-inducing films which became pop culture staples like Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023), can only go so far with Wuthering Heights. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff like Frankenstein’s monster. Margot Robbie embodies Catherine’s spirit, but is almost mechanical in her responses to Heathcliff’s provocations. Though it is meant to be sexual and thrilling, it achieves it performatively, rather than authentically.

Complaints about stripping the second half of the novel aside, Fennell, a long-time critic of the aristocracy, gives us the mise -en-scène but not the misery, the costumes but not the craziness, and the consummation but not the constant yearning the two have for each other, except in the scenes when they are children.