Just five seconds before the real opening scene of Wuthering Heights, you are greeted with a pitch-black screen and the sounds of what seems to be a man moaning faster and faster as he tries to reach his climax. When he lets out one last heave, the screen opens to reveal that the man was not having an orgasm, but was, in fact, being hanged to death. We never learn who this man was, and we certainly never see him again. If this isn’t the best introduction to Emerald Fennell’s horny, vapid, and at times distressingly superficial take on the classic Emily Brontë novel, then I don’t know what is.
This isn’t Fennell’s first romp in the land of horniness. There was Saltburn, which dealt with desire and psychopathic horndogs (and also starred Jacob Elordi). To some extent, Promising Young Woman also played with these themes, except through the lens of a rape-revenge thriller. But in Wuthering Heights (or excuse me, “Wuthering Heights,” as Fennell has stylized her adaptation), the director has taken her love for smut to the extreme, because her versions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw can’t seem to stop fucking each other (physically and emotionally) every other scene.
A quick synopsis before we get into the dirty details: Fennell’s Wuthering Heights centers around Catherine (Margot Robbie), the daughter of a ruined Yorkshire lord, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), her brutish adopted brother who is just as poor as she is. There is an undeniable sexual tension between the two, but before Heathcliff can completely act on it, Catherine has gone and accepted a marriage proposal from their much wealthier neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Heathcliff runs away in shame and anger, and doesn’t return to Catherine’s side until five years later, when he’s made his own fortune.
Like most romances set against a Gothic backdrop, Wuthering Heights is all about the foreplay. Except, in Fennell’s world, there is nothing subtle about the ways her characters are signaling their need to fuck. There’s Heathcliff fingering a moist mess of crushed egg yolks as he thinks about his adoptive sister staring at him from her bedroom window. There’s Catherine sticking her perfectly manicured pointer into the mouth of a fish encased in Jell-O. Everything from extremely tight corsets to horse bridles becomes a metaphor of sorts, and you don’t have to think too hard to realize that it’s all about sex.
When Fennell’s leading couple eventually do give in to their urges (after a lot of getting wet in the rain and a wonderful scene involving Heathcliff lifting Catherine up by her corset), all attempts at foreplay fly out the window. They’re fucking on hard dining tables, in muddy open fields, in graveyard archways (with a burial in the background, no less); what’s more, they’re fucking to Charli XCX’s songs and Anthony Willis’ bass-heavy original score, making all of these sex scenes feel like a very long, and very gratuitous, music video.
There’s no denying that Wuthering Heights is a delicious sex dream. However, the problem with this adaptation of the Brontë novel is that it is pretty much just a delicious sex dream, and if you try to take away anything more meaningful from the movie, then you’ll come up dry.
Yes, there’s a ghost of a plot. Like the other adaptations that came before it, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights primarily deals with the novel’s first act and focuses solely on the doomed romance between Heathcliff and Catherine. Elordi and Robbie, for all their bratty revenge sex throughout the movie, do bring a level of gravitas and grace that makes the love between their characters much more believable.
But other than that, all bets are off, and the movie strays away so much from its source material that you’d be better off either interpreting it as Fennell’s smutty fanfiction about Wuthering Heights or as a different Gothic romance altogether.
The months leading up to the release of Wuthering Heights have not been too kind to the director, and, to some extent, for good reason. Fans of the Brontë novel have been quick to call out Fennell for casting Elordi, a white man, as a character who has been canonically described as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect.” The director has made a half-baked attempt to address the controversy, saying in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.”
I have no qualms with directors adapting their favorite novels, and I certainly don’t object to Fennell giving us two hours of softcore Gothic porn. However, it feels as if she’s just stolen Brontë’s main characters and slapped the Wuthering Heights title onto a steamy romance of her own making. Fennell skims over the more sensitive themes of social class, poverty, revenge, and intergenerational trauma in favor of some sexy time between Heathcliff, Catherine, and, honestly, quite a few of the other characters (prepare yourself to see Alison Oliver sporting a metal collar and going, “Woof, woof.”). Wuthering Heights is definitely a visual feast for Fennell, but unfortunately, it’s not saying much.
