Wuthering Heights review: 'all the eroticism of a 1980s Flake advert'
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi fail to generate much onscreen heat as Cathy and Heathcliff in this faux-outrageous take on Wuthering Heights, writes Alistair Harkness
Wuthering Heights (15) ★★★
The first half of Emerald Fennell’s lavish, meme-ready, TikTok-courting adaptation of Wuthering Heights is about as vapid, forced and faux-outrageous as you’d expect from the writer/director of such overheated nonsense as Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. Starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, it re-imagines Emily Brontë’s torrid tale of thwarted love as a naughty, haughty, toxic romance replete with mild BDSM, bratty behaviour and the sort of ostentatious production design that frequently makes it look like one of those cry-for-help Architectural Digest videos in which movie stars with too much money invite you into their homes to proudly show off their terrible taste.
Kicking proceedings off with a public hanging, Fennell’s certainly not subtle about setting us up for a lurid spectacle; and she proceeds to present the titular home of Cathy’s father as a kind of gothic version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, with towers jutting out of the Yorkshire landscape at impossible angles and Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) pissing and puking all over the place.
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A drunkenly philanthropic whim on Earnshaw’s part soon brings the wayward Heathcliff into the house when he’s still a boy (he’s played by Adolescence star Owen Cooper) and, though Fennell isn’t very good at teasing out credibly feral performances from her young cast as Heathcliff and Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) form a quasi-incestuous childhood bond on the Moors, Clunes is at least entertainingly grotesque as Cathy’s destined-to-be-destitute father whose ruin will reverberate throughout her life.
This starts to happen as the grown-up Cathy seeks security in the house of the Earnshaws’ nouveau riche neighbour Edward Linton (Shazad Latif) just as her suppressed passion for the now ruggedly maned Heathcliff erupts. The problem here, though, is that for all their aesthetic perfection — or perhaps because of their aesthetic perfection — Robbie and Elordi generate very little onscreen heat.
What should feel forbidden and dangerous instead plays like a period spin on 50 Shades of Gray, with their passion either channelled into bonk-heavy montages soundtracked by Charlie XCX or euphemistically hinted at in symbolically gooey scenes of bread dough being shaped and snails inching across windowpanes. Meanwhile, scenes designed to be transgressive (like the voyeuristic one of Heathcliff spying on Cathy masturbating on the Moors) have all the eroticism of a 1980s Flake advert.
And yet, as the film moves into its tragic second half, something weird happens: it doesn’t exactly get good, but it does get stranger and more interesting. The deranged dollhouse design of the Linton’s Thrushcross Grange manor — with its blood-red acrylic floors, skin-coloured wallpaper, fireplaces made of hand sculptures and rooms filled with ostentatious ball gowns — gives the film some crazy horror movie energy just as Cathy starts mentally and physically deteriorating.
Fennell, too, goes for baroque in her Brian De Palma-esque shots of blood spreading across bedsheets; and Elordi suddenly comes into his own as the more refined-on-the-surface Heathcliff starts channelling his brutishness and cruelty into targets beyond just Cathy. In short, the film’s style-over-substance emptiness starts working in its favour. It’s a gaudy and confused love story for gaudy and confused times.
Wuthering Heights is in cinemas from 13 February
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