Wuthering Heights | Review | The cinema blog

★★★

It’s not loyalty that draws crowds to Emerald Fennell’s show.Wuthering Heights“, a film that often feels less like an Emily Brontë adaptation than an organic entity in its own right. No, it’s bathtub cum and FOMO-fueled walks, lured by Fennell’s unique brand of chic, conservative baiting. To that end, the film starts strong, with heavy breathing giving way to a memorably erotic hanging. The corpse has an erection and Vicki Pepperdine plays a horny nun. Mercy, me. Where Fennell’s Heights Students of literature will be delighted, but there is enough here for those of cinema to digest. Many dazzled.

As vibration-based cinema, Fennell’s film is less detached from Brontë’s original text than purists might have you believe. Certainly, it seems entirely appropriate, given the accusations of moral depravity leveled against “Wurling Heights” in 1847, that a contemporary remake might seek to up the ante in pursuit of a comparable reception from the modern viewer. Brontë’s gothic influences are also retained. Liters of fog roll in over the Yorkshire moors, on which much of the action takes place, while the light but deliberate rain is effectively transformed into film grain. Naturally, Fennell can’t help but enhance her own gothic romanticism with an excess of bow and an eye for high camp. The approach is as subtle as a brick in the head but delicious nonetheless.

Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper – from Adolescence fame – introduce young Cathy and Heathcliff, the latter rescued from the streets of Liverpool by the former’s comically barbaric father (an excellent Martin Clunes). Each wild, the pair grow into each other across the windswept moors and soon become inseparable. This is so since, years later, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi – each impeccable in their accents – took on the roles. The thrust of everything that follows lives and dies on the raw chemistry that a petulant Robbie shares with burly, muscular Elordi. Aside from the age inconsistency, it’s perfect casting.

It’s true that Fennell’s screenplay craves more scenes that last sixty seconds – there can’t be more than half a dozen over the course of the runtime – and the breathing space these would give to his story. This comes to a kind of head in a midsection reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann. Gatsbywith its original soundtrack written by Charli XCX, but matures into a more tortured final third. The emotional register pulses around crowds of desire and longing, without ever sinking that much deeper into the soul behind it. There’s enough carnal ferocity and lust to fuel the fires of hell itself, but not quite the substance to find the humanity required.

The same cannot be said of the aesthetic quality of the film, which turns out to be splendid on all levels. From the heights themselves, framed by imposing slate rocks, to the cavalcade of fashions offered to Cathy in Linton’s time. If her wedding dress transgresses the norms of the time, its elegant appearance appears no less extraordinary, treated through the foam. No opportunity is missed in “Wuthering Heights” so that the sheer melodrama of a powerful visual is carefully handled. Perhaps best of all is the transition from an overhead shot of a grief-stricken Cathy, a mass of blood-red muslin on a chessboard floor, to that of Heathcliff on horseback, framed against a sky of raging shadow.

Even without the second half of the book and Brontë’s denser plot, Fennell’s film begins to feel long as the finale approaches. There are only so many summary scores and rampant adultery that anyone can stomach and Fennell doesn’t have a naked Barry Keoghan in her back pocket to take this one to the end. Instead, a flashback: “I will love you until the day I die, and after.” The extent of your grief will depend on whether you agree with hers and whether Fennell’s gorgeous widescreen has enough width for the smallest details it contains.

T.S.