I love Wuthering Heights. Genuinely love it. It's one of my favorite books. So you'd think that Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" would inspire me to write something, either out of anger or annoyance or a backhanded compliment, but it is so shallow, so baby-brained, that any feelings it engendered in me have already passed through my fingers like sand.
If this movie was an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, if it actually wanted to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, there would be plenty to be offended by: deleting Heathcliff's status as a racialized outsider, having Isabella be a consenting party to her own brutal marital abuse, casting all the non-white actors in antagonistic roles, removing Hindley and all the class tension he brings with him, and on and on. I guess I am offended by all of that, but it seems like a waste of energy. Emerald Fennell is a rich dunce who is clueless and clumsy about race, and seems to possess genuinely retrograde ideas about the poor. These qualities are evident in all of her work.
Let's be honest though. "Wuthering Heights" really doesn't want to be Wuthering Heights. I don't think it's even interested in being a iconoclastic adaptation. It's mostly interested in taking the genre cliches people envision when they hear the title and finding reasons for Robbie and Elordi's characters to find themselves within those cliches. Unfortunately the movie is so strangely calibrated in its tone and casting, so flinching in its engagement with sexuality, that even the hoary classics of romantasy-adjacent Gothic Romance™ end up diluted and watery.
Our leads have no chemistry, first and foremost, but even if they did, they'd be fighting an uphill battle for a chance to display it. Margot Robbie's age puts such an odd, camp-gesturing spin on the relationship: we're to understand that this thirty-five year old woman is undergoing her sexual awakening? That her flailing slaps and cross-armed pouts and her "go away no come closer" posturing with the object of her desires is a genuine outpouring of her character's conflicted spirit? And to be clear, this is not a case of an older actor who is meant to be portraying a younger woman. As far as I can tell, she is meant to be her actual age in this movie. So when Heathcliff puts her up in a tree (one of his many Tall Actions - we'll return to this), we get a grown woman tantruming about how she's meant to get down in her skirts. Her performance is so outlandishly out of place that she never settles down into a character. This movie's Cathy doesn't feel like someone with a rich inner life. Her job is to get turned on, and have fits, and to learn what sex is (wet) over and over again.
Jacob Elordi (also wet) is less damaging to the film on the whole, mostly because he's less a character than he is a sexual special effect. This is because he is Tall. Never mind that he's initially styled with a beard and wig that brings to mind the sort of mad hermit who would emerge from the hedges to warn King Charles VI of an imminent betrayal. Never mind that his almost endearing effort at Yorkshire accent is so marblemouthed that you can't understand a word he says. He is Tall. He can perform the requisite actions of a large gothic boyfriend.
He can lift Cathy off the ground by the front of her bodice.
He can throw her over his shoulder.
He can chop wood shirtless, and throw around hay bales.
He can crowd her against all sorts of household furniture, and grasp her wrist commandingly.
Now, you and I both know that none of these actions make him a brute or a fiend, no matter how many times Cathy calls him one. This Heathcliff seems like a pretty good guy, honestly. The girl he likes gives him the runaround for a decade because she can't seem to figure out how to fuck, but he's loyal and stands stoically in the face of her juvenile posturing. When he returns from making his fortune he and Cathy fall into one another's arms almost immediately, and he doesn't take any vengeful action until she breaks off their affair months later. That vengeance takes the form of marrying silly Isabella, but he gets her explicit consent at every step of the process. Are you good with me doing this to spite Cathy? Are you good with me ravishing you? Are you good with a little light doggie roleplay? Awesome, so glad we talked. He says something to Cathy about killing Edgar, but it's in the middle of sex, he never actually tries anything, and of course intimates that he'd only do it if Cathy asked him.
I guess what I'm saying is that if a friend of mine was dating Emerald Fennell's Heathcliff, I'd be okay with it. He loves consent, and as I've mentioned, is Tall.
I think it should be pretty obvious at this point that the central romance is denuded of real interpersonal conflict. She slaps at him, he manfully restrains her. I don't know what they talk about. I don't know how they experience the world together. There's no lived-in intimacy between them, except for one moment when he uses his hands as a visor to shield her from the rain. I liked that, I thought it was sweet. But it was mostly notable for its singularity.
So without any real push and pull between them, we're mostly stuck with bad things happening to our lovers, but it's not their fault. (It's the help's fault, obviously, in classic Fennell mode.) Their separation is tragic, though. So tragic. The movie rests its hand over ours, stares meaningfully into our eyes, and demands that we mourn the fact that a love so heavingly passionate was never allowed to thrive.
Speaking of heavingly passionate. Let's talk about the reason we're all here.
This was sold to audiences as an erotic movie. A sexy, subtext-made-throbbing-text take on a gothic novel. Not a bad idea in and of itself. I think moviegoers are starved for sex, generally, and there's real money to be made off our desire to watch two hot people get after it. (see: the recent success of those hockey boys.) Unfortunately for "Wuthering Heights"'s sensual ambitions, there is a terrible flaw baked into it that cannot be overcome:
Emerald Fennell does not have the soul of a true pervert. She doesn't even have the soul of a true horndog. This movie is one of the most sexually inert things I've seen in a while, and I'm fascinated by that.
Because it wants to be sexy! It as expressly written to be sexy! It was meant to be titillating and give you a little frisson of excitement in your movie theatre chair. And it fails over and over again.
Some critics are calling this movie disappointingly vanilla, but that's not exactly right. I don't like to use "vanilla" as a synonym for "unerotic"; some of the best and hottest sex scenes I've ever encountered happened in standard locations and positions, with pretty standard acts on display. I think what people are grasping for is that this movie fails to be transgressive.
I'm trying not to spend too much time discussing this movie as an adaptation, but before we move on, I do want to briefly say that when you are this divorced from Wuthering Heights' source material, you have basically none of the inherent tensions of that text in your sexy toolbox anymore. There are no racial lines to cross, the feral essence of the land disappears, gender means very little beyond what you'd find in like. Bridgerton.
In Andrea Arnold's spare, primitive 2011 Wuthering Heights, there's a scene where the child Cathy comforts Heathcliff out on the moors after a whipping, and she licks the wounds on his back like a cat. It's shot in a tight close up, and there's this extremely haptic, textured few seconds where we just watch the contrast of her white skin against his dark skin, the wetness of the blood, and the way the grass is blowing in the background. It's intimate and sensual and a little shocking, and lends a powerful eroticism to the characters' relationship as they grow up.
However, due to various creative choices, Emerald Fennell doesn't have access to that heavily-laden, source based imagery, so she has to build her erotic, forbidden world from the ground up.
Take my hand. Join me in her world of desire.
So first of all, Fennell wants you to know that sex is like death. Have you guys heard of this? That sex and death are similar, and perhaps even the same, when you really think about it? The Chaotic, Filthy Poor watch a man be hanged a the start of the film, and his orgasmic gasping death throes and erection are front and center. We watch a nun be aroused by this, and the crowd fall to celebration and ribaldry in the aftermath. This is how she opens the movie. Stupid and obvious, sure, her trademark, but you know. A gothic theme to end all gothic themes. Anyway, it never comes up again. This isn't a movie about hauntings, or getting handsy with your lover's corpse. Heathcliff lies chastely beside Cathy's body when she finally dies, they don't seek oblivion or disintegration in one another's arms. People die later on, but their deaths aren't eroticized. At best they're aestheticized, at worst, just blown past. This is the first half-eaten bird the script lays proudly in our lap.
Next in the garden of delights: I don't think Fennell actually knows how to construct or shoot an sexual encounter. When Heathcliff and Cathy finally hook up, we see them fuck a lot, in like a half dozen different zones, in various states of wetness, but one thing is consistent: the details of the sex. We always encounter them midway through the act, mostly-clothed, with Cathy on top (I hesitate to say riding him, this is a sedate pony trot at best), gripping his head, as they gasp "I love you" over and over again. That's it. That's the sex. It varies once, I think, and that's because they need to have actual dialogue, so we get a little exotic and have him fuck her on her back on a totally cleared table. I cannot overstate to you how comfortably you could be a teenager and watch the sex scenes in this movie with your parents sitting next to you on the couch. There is not a tit to be seen in this movie, or an ass, certainly not a dick.
People climb on one another, people masturbate, people even engage in awkward ponyplay, but everything is so disembodied (we see quickly edited images of arms moving, mouths gasping, fisheye lenses of horse bridles being lowered onto characters' heads) that none of it feels like anything. No sex acts build, nothing feels tactile, there's no edging and there's certainly no release. Music video editing and zero sensuality. I have seen looping gifs of Fortnite pornography that were more exciting than this.
In another brief exception that proves the rule, Cathy and Heathcliff steal a kiss at a funeral; he lifts up her veil to reach her and they make out for a bit before he lowers it again. Then, briefly, she kisses him through her veil.
It's good! Tactile, romantic, the visuals echo the themes at work. But we just blaze past it. It's one single kiss after yet another blah liplocking session, and the movie cuts away almost immediately. It doesn't seem to realize that this is its whole stupid Wattpad gothic romance pitch. Bitch you had it! For a given value of "it", but you did. Unbelievable.
(Also this being at a funeral is not engaged with beyond it being another location for Cathy and Heathcliff to unwisely get busy. In case you were keeping track of the sex and death thing.)
Emerald Fennell, self-styled provocateur, is not doing great thus far, but she still has what she clearly thinks is her secret weapon: this is an extremely slimy, viscous, damp movie. Cathy (again, at age 35) puts eggs in Heathcliff's bed to express her pique and when he accidentally crushes them, he runs his fingers slowly through the yolk. It's constantly raining. A snail moves wetly across a window, someone pounds bread with oil. Once or twice its played for laughs, but mostly it's quite sincere. Passion is gooey.
And yet, this visual theme gives us a scene which functions as the single best encapsulation of the movie's erotic limitations.
So Cathy gets crazy turned on by Heathcliff, and heads to the moors to get herself off. She's got a hand going furiously under her skirts but then Heathcliff appears, having followed her there. Of course, because it's This Kind of corset movie, she's embarrassed and tries to run back to the house, but he catches her by the wrist and holds up her hand to himself and to the audience.
Her fingers are dry as a bone.
All that slippery, slick set dressing, but when we arrive at the moment to tie that to an erotic beat between the characters, to stick the landing, the movie flinches. Because of course it does. To have Heathcliff do what he does next (put her very clean fingers into his mouth, along with some grass that she shoves in there awkwardly, which confuses the sexual charge of the act but whatever) with Cathy's visibly pussy-wet fingers would be a genuinely transgressive moment in a big movie like this. It would require Fennell to imagine the erotic not as something that can be pinterest-board gestured at, but as something with taste, with texture. I truly don't think she's capable of that.
Lots of filmmakers are dumb. Some of those dumb filmmakers make great art. Because they're dumb but libidinal, or dumb but exciting, or dumb but funny. Fennell is none of those things. She's just dumb, and she's asking us to be dumb with her.
She moves dolls around onscreen, but won't let them be people. She clacks their pelvises together, but won't let them fuck. And if they don't have hearts, and they don't have urges, what are they? What's the point of any of this?
The room wallpapered in Cathy's skin was such a weird, interesting idea, but then we had to have the characters explicitly say that's what it was, in universe, and all the verve just went out of the concept like air out of a balloon.
I laughed out loud when I saw the old ladies knitting at the side of the scaffold in the opening. This is a visual trope tied almost exclusively to the French Revolution (and the Terror specifically) in popular culture. What does their anachronistic placement at a rural English hanging suggest? If I was being kind, I'd say that Fennell, a dope, thinks that it's just the sort of thing that happens at ye olde public execution. If I was being less generous, I'd say that it's perhaps another unflattering look into her anxieties around the lower classes, subconsciously expressed. Madame Defarge you will always be famous.
Great stupid costumes and set design, totally wasted; I don't know if it was a failure of the lighting or the cinematography, but this movie looked like it was shot with an old shoe.
I can't fucking believe I watched Gone With The Wind to prepare for this nonsense, but I do think it was informative in that Gone With The Wind simply does not think about race. It can be absolutely and brilliantly read to be about race by academics and the viewer, but the movie does not concern itself with race. Emerald Fennell, circa 2026, thinks about race exactly as much as Gone With The Wind thinks about race. So make of that what you will.
The Charlie XCX album absolutely rules, and is SUCH a better adaptation of the book than this misbegotten movie.
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