The term “all style, no substance” comes pretty close to describing this new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Despite its talented cast and impressive visuals, this film leaves the audience with nothing to sink their teeth into.
Based on the famous Emily Bronte romance novel of the same name, the film has been adapted many times over the years. Director Emerald Fennell brings her provocative touch to the story with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the starring roles. Robbie and Elordi do a lot of heavy lifting here. While their characters lack depth, they have great chemistry on screen, with Elordi in particular possessing a domineering presence in the second half.
The story centers around Cathy and Heathcliff, who meet in 1771 after Cathy’s father rescues him from the streets of Liverpool. Cathy is shown to be a spoiled brat as a child and regards Heathcliff as a pet. However, they develop a close bond that turns into confused lust as they become adults.
The first hour of the movie offers plenty of nice visuals as the film loves to show the contrast between the drab colors of Cathy and Heathcliff’s former home, Wuthering Heights, to the world of color and artificiality that Cathy enters into when she marries the wealthy Edgar Linton. There’s no real romance in that first hour, and no intricate plot or deep characters for the audience in which to become engrossed. Instead, the writer has banked on seeing a smut story come to life to sell the movie.
The sets used for Thrushcross Grange, Cathy’s husband’s estate, use a lot of vibrant colors and artificiality to create an aesthetic that looks like real people living in a giant dollhouse. The imagery isn’t exactly subtle, but it fits the story and makes for something interesting to look at.
One surprising aspect of the film is its humor. There’s a decent amount of jokes, usually visual, to be found here. A favorite is when Cathy finds her father dead in front of comically large piles of liquor that he apparently drank by himself. By the end of the film, I wished Fennell spent more time on her talented wit because she could have made a great satire of the great novel.
Sex and overt sexual imagery are the icing that Fennell uses to disguise a somewhat bland cake into something titillating enough for people to sit through. There are some thematic reasons for it: The exploration of sex used as a tool to exert power over someone, the contrast of the prim and proper lords being motivated by base desires, and so on. The problem is that the film doesn’t take those ideas anywhere; it just presents them to us and moves on.
The second half of the film follows Heathcliff’s return to Wuthering Heights after he has mysteriously amassed wealth. It’s a big part of the novel, but most of the story occurs after his return. Here, the script tries to speed through the falling out that Cathy and Heathcliff have with each other, with the difference being that they have an intimate affair.
In the book, Heathcliff and Cathy’s love story sets the bar as the greatest tragic love story in the English language -- along with Romeo and Juliet's. But in this adaptation, Cathy’s feelings for Heathcliff are tangled up with her selfish need to control him, while Heathcliff views sex as a way to dominate.
The choice to spend half the movie’s runtime before Heathcliff’s return hurts the pacing. Spending more time on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship falling apart and adding more nuance to their characters would have gone a long way in making the ending less saccharine. The end of a great love story is something to be mourned, yet I felt relief when the credits started rolling.
There are a few things I’ve learned recently that have made this movie make more sense. One is that there appears to be a rise in people reading smut -- I’m not here to judge; more power to them. The other is that Fennell’s last movie was very popular on TikTok.
That’s all to say that this film will likely find its audience in an unconventional place. Maybe Emerald Fennell is farther ahead in the film game than people realize, and she’s future-proofing her work for a new generation. Either way, people who want a great romance story with deep characters will likely have to look elsewhere.
Author Bio:
Ulises Duenas is a senior writer and film critic at Highbrow Magazine.
For Highbrow Magazine