“Wuthering Heights” at times feels like bringing the lump in your throat to the screen. The classic novel from Emily Brontë may have met major tweaks in this reimagining but the core of why the book has maintained an affection throughout the years is on full display. The yearning, the lust for love and to be understood, and the devotion that drives to eternal damnation are front and center in Emerald Fennell’s best film to date. 

It’s impossible to talk about an Emerald Fennell film without acknowledging the vitriol thrown her way before a film is even in production, just from when she has a project is simply announced is she met online with an insane amount of discourse that feels completely over the top. What’s fascinating about her “Wuthering Heights” is that she leans into this. The opening scene of the film is a black screen with just creaking noises and a man moaning, you immediately think you’re listening to a man moments away from a climax when the picture finally clues you in, a man is being hanged in front of an audience. The moaning is him gasping for breath, desperate for life slipping through his fingers. The camera pans an audience laughing that the man has an erection so publicly in the last moments of his life. He’s dying in front of them, for God knows what, and all they can focus on is the salacious erection before them and how ‘silly’ it is for him to have that reaction. It pairs to the discussion that’s bled into the critical reviews of the film of what you were expecting versus what the film was. You were expecting a raunchy film and instead the film was drawn back, less characters (even just from the first half of the book) and heightened focus on the two star-crossed lovers. What are you missing when you’re distracted by the sex or conversation on the lack of sex here? Many of the critiques of Fennell’s work feel similar in a vein, similar to the response when Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name was released. While Brontë’s work is timeless and continues to push the envelope with what it says about growing up, 

The novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ has always felt like something many have circled back to, me included, for its depiction of a devotion and a consuming need to possess, in the unhealthiest way possible. Fennell’s reimagining puts that palpable yearning, desire brimming with rage and desperation at odds with the tender love it wants to be. A critique of this adaptation has been that it feels like a teenager’s idea of a sweeping romance but that’s precisely why so many were drawn to it in the first place. To disregard the experience of a young girl who had never been kissed or had sex reading this for the first time is the same thing we see every time there’s a female driven story. Many of us read the novel before we had been touched and what we imagined sex, romance, wanting, and love to be is not what it actually was. The sex being quite tame and underutilized within the film actually feels so realistic in representing that bridge of reader of the book to finally having a sexual experience after. It’s never that sweeping, riding a horse across the moors to get to you. What’s fascinating with Fennell’s take here is bringing to focus the sadistic bond between our two lovers. Cathy (career best Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) are a literary couple many readers return to for their toxic pull between each other. It’s impossible to root for them, they’re both terrible people and they’re even worse for each other. The marketing of ‘the greatest love story of all time’ isn’t even a stretch to me because sometimes the vilest, disturbing, abusive relationship is your greatest love story, no matter how much you don’t want it to be. Time after time we return to those who wrong us, hurt us, inflict pain on us because it’s an addiction. The rush of passion, the endorphin of that person seeing you and understanding you, it’s a high no one healthy can replicate. When the novel dropped, this was disturbing to many as it felt sickening to reckon with, and it still does for some, especially those who have never experienced it. What Fennell does in “Wuthering Heights” is focus on the sadomasochistic themes within their love and the world they occupy. The pain and the pleasure, the arousal and danger; it’s all from the same place and brings the same climax. 

The very world in which Cathy and Heathcliff occupy is filled with filth, but there’s something so primal about the way everyone moves throughout it, clinging to what pleasure they can find. By the time we get to the Grange, it’s almost a prison for Cathy. She has always been so self-destructive and finds little value to human life but after marrying Mr. Linton (Shazad Latif) and Heathcliff running away, the life is sucked out of her, the delight even at the drama she causes others. The Grange is both opulent and empty; the rooms are over-the-top, grand and luxurious yet completely empty. The production design (Suzie Davies) is unreal as it uses various human body parts to fill the estate, driving home the themes of this affluent family building its wealth off of others. The skin bedroom, the hands on the walls holding up candles, the blood red floors. While Fennell does stray away from some of the important themes of the novel, which should rightfully be critiqued, it’s fascinating the way she uses design to engage with the class structure. The window that Heathcliff watches Cathy out of not even being clear. The house at Wuthering Heights being six feet four inches tall yet Elordi being an inch taller so Heathcliff can never quite actually own the place, it never belongs to him, he can never truly inhabit the home he purchases. A favorite detail of the production design goes hand-in-hand with my favorite part of the script, the dollhouse and the scoping out of Mr. Linton’s ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). “Wuthering Heights” masters the the slide between realism and unrealism and with the dollhouse paired with brilliant camerawork from legend Linus Sandgren, you feel dizzy with the perspective of what is real and what is a mirage to make the time pass for Cathy, but also for Isabella. She’s presented with having such a hard time separating the real world from play. Even her introduction, the way she’s talking about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is so loaded with emotions she doesn’t seem to have an understanding on. When we see her introduce the dollhouse to Cathy, she’s overcome with an uneasy joy to share with her but it’s uncomfortable to watch with brilliant complexity Oliver brings. Her fixations are so childish from ribbons to dolls but it’s laying the groundwork for this arrested development. The biggest indicator of this for me before her plot with Heathcliff even begins is this dollhouse within a dollhouse, she is always engaging with play, that is until she gets what she finally feels is real attention. When Heathcliff approaches her, despite him laying out his true intentions, she’s so desperate for the affection, she thinks it’s a game she can play to her advantage. She’s been playing house, watching interactions, the way we all read romance novels and thought it would teach us how to truly be in a relationship or how to prepare for sex. Isabella’s removal from reality and her deep fixations blinds her to what is really happening, until she’s finally given space to have a voice. Fennell brings truth to Heathcliff saying, ‘she’s an equal in degradation.’ When she’s with Heathcliff, she has an agency she didn’t seem to have with Cathy and Linton. She was truly a fixture in their home, not someone to speak up or voice an opinion. Cathy is straight up vindictive and abusive with her; Linton plays into the infantilization of her. With Heathcliff, Isabella finally finds a way to breathe and find some way out. The wink at Nelly (a brilliant Hong Chau) is at an audience too, just like the erection of the hanging man at the start of the film. 

“Wuthering Heights” is masterful due to the perfect performances and simmering chemistry between Robbie and Elordi. They both are always great but under the direction of Fennell and playing off one another, it’s some of their best work, for me, it’s Robbie’s best performance to date. It is entirely impossible to overlook the whitewashing of Heathcliff, especially given the manner in which Fennell doesn’t embrace any of the racial themes from the original text. While Elordi is perfect in the film, this character historically has not been interpreted as white. Cathy and Heathcliff are horribly unlikable. As girls date horrible men, we often think back to the fictional character who led us to have ‘a type,’ and unfortunately for many of us, it’s Heathcliff. We didn’t have the toolbox or language to understand how awful he was when we first read the book. Elordi embodies the charm of why you’d want him but grow to be disgusted by him. The scene of him on the couch laying out his plans with Isabella to Cathy paired with him waiting on the moors for her each day, he’s a monster yet he’s tender and loving. But it’s that final scene for him that makes it easy to say that Elordi is a generational leading man; we will refer back to those final close ups of him in this film as when we knew we had our next classic film star. Robbie is able to bring the confusion of girlhood, being the face of your family’s future and being a derogatory brat all within one performance. She’s infuriating yet fascinating, and you can’t stop trying to see what she’s thinking or how she’s calculating her next terrible decision. It’s the scenes with Robbie and Elordi together that bring the film to new heights (sorry). Their chemistry is unmatched and Robbie saying they wanted to bring a new Tianic level romance wasn’t a set up for me; I actively sobbed and felt every moment of love between their characters in that final scene. I hate them both so much, yet I understand them and their pull towards one another. There’s something about the high of a love from someone who enrages you but sees you. Fennell understands the key part of their story is they’re one shared (evil) soul; when Cathy says, “he’s more me than I am myself,” it’s the truth. He sees her and understands her so well because he is her. When he says he wants her to haunt him, it’s because he has spent his life feeling they’re the same person, he can’t inhabit the world without her. It’s a toxic pull full of unfathomable rage, disgust, hatred, but also consuming love that can only deliver a passion you feel you’ll never get from someone else. They both have a need to possess one another, and they can’t find that rush anywhere else. Why exist without each other then?

The original music by Charli xcx is some of the best music created for a film in quite some time. It’s ethereal yet haunting. It’s consuming yet fades into the background. The sweeping nature combined with hints of Nine Inch Nails and early 90s grunge feels perfectly paired for the filthy world of Cathy and Heathcliff. Tears brought to my eyes with the running or on horseback through the moors, the montage of secret sex between lovers, the final goodbye. Is it a dream? Is it reality? Charli is a brilliant songwriter and every single track here is no different. It’s all a callback to her self-titled and ‘True Romance’ but feels the exact follow up to ‘brat’ in a way only her real fans would have seen coming. The Titanic sounding ‘Open Up’ to the Heathcliff point-of-view ‘Seeing Things,’ the album is the perfect pairing (and so very clearly album of the year). 

“Wuthering Heights” at times feels like bringing the lump in your throat to the screen. For me, it was the first time I saw a screen adaptation of the novel that reminded me of how I felt when I read it for the first time as a young girl. As someone who feels her big love was the unhealthiest relationship, Fennell brings the desperation to feel seen by the only man you think will ever understand you, the inability to see pain and pleasure as two separate things and the rush of feeling you’re floating and drowning at the same time.  

Grade: A+

Oscar Prospects:
Likely: Best Costume Design
Should Be Considered: Best Lead Actress (Margot Robbie), Best Lead Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song, Best Production Design

Where to Watch: In Theaters