There is no set formula for what makes a successful film adaptation of a literary classic. The closest thing we might get to a rubric lies in the essence of the source material. Wuthering Heights is one of the most imposing novels in the English canon, a brutally miserable text with practically no one to root for.
At its core, Emily Brontë’s only book is about the ramifications of generational trauma. Heathcliff arrives to the titular Wuthering Heights as an orphan boy, quickly becoming the favorite of his adoptive father, Mr Earnshaw. Earnshaw’s two biological children have polar opposite reactions to Heathcliff. Hindley Earnshaw is jealous of his new brother, while Catherine “Cathy” sees a new pet, and later, the love of her life.
The generational trauma in the text is set in motion after the death of Mr Earnshaw. Hindley and his new wife Frances hate Heathcliff, beating him and reducing his status to that of a servant. With Heathcliff’s prospects limited, particularly by the restrictions and cruelty of his adoptive brother, now the master of Wuthering Heights, Catherine turns to their neighbor, Edgar Linton, as a potential match.
Heathcliff never gets over his poor treatment by Hindley, or his rejection by Cathy. Cathy dies during childbirth about halfway through the novel. Its second half is entirely consumed with Heathcliff’s desire for vengeance upon the descendants of Hindley and Edgar, plus his own hated son, born of his perplexing and cruel marriage to Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister.
Heathcliff knew only cruelty as a child. Whatever sympathies the reader might feel for him are gradually washed away through the course of the text, as Heathcliff doles out brutality in more than equal measure. Mostly through the novel’s narrator, Nelly Dean, Brontë makes clear that Heathcliff is not a figure to root for.
For her third feature, Emerald Fennell largely truncates the sprawling nature of Brontë’s work. There is no Hindley Earnshaw, or subsequent generation. The second half of the book is gone. The quotation marks placed around the title Wuthering Heights make clear that this is a very different adaptation of the seminal book.
Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi, with Owen Cooper portraying young Heathcliff) comes to Wuthering Heights in much the same way as the book. Only now, Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) is the degenerate gambler who beats him. Cathy (Margot Robbie, with Charlotte Mellington portraying young Cathy) is now an only child, who gives Heathcliff his name as a mark of possession, her pet to endure the boredom of her unstimulating environment.
From a stylistic standpoint, Fennell marvelously captures the essence of the book. Wuthering Heights is an imposing, dreary structure out in the middle of nowhere. By comparison, the Linton’s Thrushcross Grange is a beacon of hope, brimming with life. The cinematography beautifully captures all of the characters’ natural feelings of isolation, alongside the foreboding sense of dread that lingers of every page of Brontë’s prose.
Robbie and Elordi are both cartoonishly miscast. Heathcliff is unambiguously dark-skinned in the book, contributing to his sense of othering. Elordi does his best to capture Heathcliff’s brutishness, but it’s not particularly convincing.
In the book, Cathy was eighteen when she died during childbirth. Robbie is quite a bit older. The film makes modest allowances for this discrepancy, once referring to Catherine as being as old as a spinster, but Fennell misses a key opportunity to explore how these age dynamics might play into her new version of why Catherine abandoned her true love.
Cathy and Heathcliff’s unresolved sexual tension is a vital throughline in the book. Cathy basically edges Heathcliff into oblivion. He never stops loving Cathy, yet treats her daughter, who has many of her features, with inexplicable cruelty.
Fennell has no interest in keeping Elordi and Robbie’s hands off each other. In doing so, she relents on the undercurrent powering much of the novel. What takes its place is largely the downfall of her film.
Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights with such intensity and fervor that it’s hard not to admire her work, even if you never want to read it again. Fennell reduces all of that to a mere matter of vibes. This film is all about the vibes.
To be clear, there’s a lot to like about Fennell’s sense of atmosphere. Every frame is full of meticulously structured imagery. It’s a beautiful film to look at. The music, with a score provided by Fennell regular Anthony Willis, and original songs by Charli XCX, is delightfully on point.
But there’s an emptiness of substance that Fennell struggles to shake. Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) is reduced to nothing more than a patsy. Nelly (Hong Chau) is barely around at all, lacking the delectable nuance she wields throughout the text.
The biggest crime is Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver), whom Fennell treats as a complete joke. Isabella’s loveless marriage to Heathcliff is not the confusing tragedy of the text, but an outlet for BDSM humor. Heathcliff is let off the hook for his cruelty, a recurring theme for Fennell throughout her narrative.
Brontë does supply reasons to feel bad for Heathcliff in the text, but she never tries to carry water for her character. Heathcliff is a bad man who unquestionably becomes the primary antagonist of the book for its second half. Fennell isn’t really interested in exploring the nature of his descent into a monster so much as she wants to make excuses for him. Nothing in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is ever Heathcliff’s fault.
The absence of characters like Nelly or Mr Lockwood to process the ramifications of Heathcliff and Cathy’s romance isn’t really satiated by anything else in the narrative to give meaning to all this constant heartache and turmoil. Fennell isn’t interested in generational trauma, that much is clear. What exactly is she interested in, besides horny people in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to obsess about but each other?
Wuthering Heights is a brutal read. Brontë’s work largely endures on the strength of her prose, and the gravity of her ideas. There’s so much depth to this book. It’s the kind of narrative that sticks with you, even if you didn’t like a single character.
Fennell’s work is a lewd, empty fever dream. There are a lot of attractive people being horrible to each other. Her technical skills as a filmmaker are on full display, a narrative as gorgeous as it is vacuous. Shallow should never be a word that comes to mind regarding the work of Emily Brontë.
