In an interview last month with Fandango, writer-director Emerald Fennell explains why the title on the Wuthering Heights poster is in quotations. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible,” she says. “There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version that I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.” The movie, marketed as “a film by Emerald Fennell,” might be more aptly called “Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights,” so sharply does the auteur’s vision diverge from that of the book’s author, Emily Brontë.
Fennell’s “This is my Wuthering Heights” defense proves the justification for the gleeful rewriting—some might say butchering—of the 1847 novel. The primary couple is the same: Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), the haughty daughter of a landowner, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the brooding orphan who is raised alongside her like a brother. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Cathy opines before marrying local aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), dooming everyone and herself in the process. What this film proceeds to excise could fill a book—a book called Wuthering Heights.
For one, like numerous previous adaptations, Fennell’s version leaves out the second half of the story, in which the next generation of Earnshaws and Heathcliffs (let’s call it Wuthering Heights: The New Class) breaks the cycle of generational trauma in which romantic love and abuse are indistinguishable. Characters are collapsed, erased, granted tidy backstories, while the most Gothic elements, such as the implication that Heathcliff is Catherine’s half-brother, fall away. (Meanwhile, the choice to cast a white actor as the “dark-skinned,” racially indeterminate Heathcliff drew sharp criticism from corners of the internet, suggesting that posh, Oxford-educated Fennell is more interested in bourgeois provocation than critiquing Britain’s race and class hierarchies, then or now.)
Oddly enough, Emerald Fennell’s prior features—mean and stylish, equal parts revenge play and music video—seem more moved by the spirit of Emily Brontë than this one. In Promising Young Woman, a med school dropout (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness to expose the predatory behavior of so-called “nice guys,” while conducting a campaign against the men who raped her childhood best friend. And in Saltburn, a middle-class striver (Barry Keoghan) insinuates himself into an uber-rich family through lies and sex acts, only to pick off these fatted sitting ducks one by one. Her films demand that viewers spend time with irredeemable individuals and endure, even laugh at or luxuriate in, their awful behavior. Meanwhile, this Wuthering Heights has not one but multiple redemption arcs. Characters offer and accept forgiveness. What, truly what, am I watching?
But what this new “adaptation” offers in lieu of fidelity is promiscuous pastiche. Equal parts Guillermo del Toro and V.C. Andrews, Wuthering Heights is saturated in every sense of the word, misty but vivid, a loud, horned-up melodrama that is weird and basic at the same time. It’s got real “Get in loser, we’re going to the moors” energy, as Fennell and Robbie attempt to appeal to a generation ready to fall in love with a less challenging, more sentimental imagining of an old classic.
Turning Brontë’s tale into “this generation’s Titanic” requires more than the smoothing of Cathy’s and Heathcliff’s edges, though that is the film’s most startling intervention. Brontë’s Cathy is quick to cuff a servant or scream her face off at everyone around her; her Heathcliff is a literal dog murderer. None of this comes through in Robbie’s or Elordi’s renderings, who play like Buttercup and Westley in The Princess Bride. The sight of a miserable Catherine, weighed down by a diamond choker, set against a millennial pink backdrop, cries out for a Billie Eilish track. Indeed, what was Cathy made for, if not to love Heathcliff? (LuckyChap Entertainment, Robbie’s production company, is responsible for Barbie and all of Fennell’s directorial turns.)
Barbie is just one of many films that weigh heavily on Wuthering Heights, competing to overtake the actual source entirely. For the British Film Institute, Fennell curated a list of her influences for her movie, providing a cheat sheet for cinephiles and an explication of her stylistic flair. She pulls prodigiously from the look of 1970s cinema and its inheritors: the old Far From the Madding Crowd, the new Beguiled, and several works from explicit art-house filmmaker Catherine Breillat, as well 1974’s controversial Third Reich–set The Night Porter. But there are more motifs or images that go unmentioned. The sooty, burned-out shell of Wuthering Heights, littered with piles of sea-foam bottles, could almost be a Tim Burton set, while the image of an ailing Catherine, bleeding and covered in leeches, belongs in an Italian giallo film.
Is Fennell entitled to treat the Western canon as her own personal playground? Why not call the movie Windy Peaks and quit filching Brontë’s luster? Because this particular Wuthering Heights is foremost a work of fan fiction, and proudly so. Catherine’s feverish scribbling of alternate names on the window—“Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Catherine Heathcliff”—is the act of a lovesick adolescent doodling in her Trapper Keeper; this film “will complete the Twilight-to-Fifty-Shades Smutty Fanfic Loop,” a critic from Thought Catalog vows.
To that end, in an early scene, Catherine experiences her sexual awakening when she spies two servants humping roughly in the stable. (It should go without saying this sequence is a Fennell addition.) Heathcliff catches Catherine spying and puts his hand over her mouth to silence her panting; covers her eyes to shield her from their saucy use of a whip and muzzle. (This formative erotic experience is one Cathy makes her husband reenact with her in bed.) As the film lays it out, here is a story about desire, yes, but also about desiring to desire as the fan fiction writer does, exploring the freedom and pleasure that comes with free play using premade materials.
All roads, in other words, lead back to Barbie.
The final product, all said, is a visually rich, transportive, if simplistic, story of love denied. It’s something of a missed opportunity for Fennell—if anyone had the nerve to put Brontë’s ugliest inclinations on-screen, it was her. But, through the character of Isabella (played by Saltburn’s Alison Oliver), she has found a clever device for dumbing down the original. As a love letter to fanfic and female fantasy, Oliver is the audience’s guide and Fennell’s twisted surrogate. For those who hoped for a darker, weirder movie, Oliver’s Weird Barbie figure provides bizarro comic relief and a point of view that no earnest ’90s romance could dream of accommodating.
When we first meet Isabella Linton, Cathy’s future sister-in-law, she is giving her brother a detailed play-by-play of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. A frizzy-haired brunette with wire-framed glasses and a whispery voice, Isabella is a bookish young woman, one of the most unforgivable archetypes in classic literature. This silly exchange, which immediately precedes the Lintons meeting Catherine, serves several purposes. Isabella’s mistrust of the Nurse figure in Shakespeare put us on guard with the film’s own nurse figure, Nelly (Hong Chau), and her passionate recounting of the play only underscores how much this Wuthering Heights is about bad timing, not bad people. (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is, unsurprisingly, another one of Fennell’s self-proclaimed touchstones.)
But last, and perhaps more importantly, this scene reveals Isabella to be the film’s ideal viewer—and the one most in need of reprogramming. When her rambling ceases, or at least slows down, her brother politely responds, “What a thorough précis, Isabella!” There is nothing duller, surely, than a humorless recapper, but for the purposes of this film, it is equally unforgivable to be so attentive to a text’s particularities. Isabella must be punished, and, boy, will she enjoy it.
When Edgar and Catherine wed, Isabella welcomes her new sister-in-law as a life-size doll, braiding her hair and taking locks of her hair to make a Cathy figure for her dollhouse (dreamhouse, even?). Isabella’s infatuation with Catherine ends when Heathcliff, who ran off in the wake of Cathy and Edgar’s wedding, returns looking, well, like Jacob Elordi. In the novel, Isabella surrenders to Heathcliff’s bored seduction, one designed entirely to drive Cathy mad, but lives to regret marrying this sadistic monster.
But Alison Oliver’s Isabella loves her imprisonment. Her pleading letters home are a ploy, composed alongside Heathcliff and with his help, to torment Catherine; she loves to be degraded, wearing the literal and figurative dog collar with kinky pride. “He would devour you,” Catherine warns Isabella, with no small amount of jealousy and spite. But such a sentiment is a vestige from the novel. It is Heathcliff who becomes Isabella’s puppet, even as the dom/sub aesthetic might make the dynamic appear otherwise. Heathcliff may be the story’s hero, but Isabella is the one who can write.
It is within Isabella’s mousy, lustful, literary gaze that this new Wuthering Heights finds a point of view, the unexpected romance trapped inside its bodice-ripper rebrand. This is, perhaps, where Fennell falters most gravely—not by scrapping the old or instituting the new but, instead, by not recognizing what she has.
