FILM OF THE WEEK: Wuthering Heights - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Emerald Fennell has never mistaken restraint for virtue, and her Wuthering Heights announces that fact with a kind of perverse grandeur. Before a single line of Brontë is spoken, she gives us a town square turned carnival of death: a man hanging, gaze lingering on his death-rattle erection, the crowd pressed close in a state that looks less like mourning than arousal. Sex workers service clients in the margins. Punch and Judy puppets leer overhead. Laughter, gawking, the low hum of appetite. Violence and sex bleed into one another until they feel like the same language. It is an astonishing opening image that immediately establishes a society so tightly buttoned that its only release valves are spectacle and flesh.

It is here that we first meet Cathy, still a child, already watchful. Fennell’s great insight is to frame her not as a swooning romantic but as an obsessive. This Cathy peers around corners, listens at doors, and studies the sex lives of the servants with furtive fascination. She fixates on Nelly, the housekeeper who becomes her confidante and reluctant chaperone. She fixates on the strange, dirty boy her father brings home one day and christens Heathcliff, installing him at Wuthering Heights as something between charity case and pet. She collects people the way other girls collect dolls. Love, in this telling, begins as ownership and control.

From there the familiar Brontë story takes shape. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the Earnshaw farm, running feral across the moors while her drunken, gambling father squanders what little security they have. Heathcliff is treated as a servant, then a scapegoat, absorbing blame for Cathy’s mischief. Their bond hardens into something possessive and absolute, less courtship than mutual dependency. When Cathy is injured and briefly taken in by their refined neighbours at Thrushcross Grange, she gets her first taste of comfort and status, a glimpse of another life that will come to haunt every decision she makes.

The early passages, led by the younger actors, are thrilling. Charlotte Mellington’s Cathy is spoiled and sharp-edged but recognisably lonely, while Adolescence’s Owen Cooper gives Heathcliff a feral loyalty that feels almost pre-verbal. Together they tear across the moors like weather systems, half wild, half inseparable. Linus Sandgren shoots the Yorkshire landscape with real menace and beauty, all fog and wind and bruised skies, so that nature itself seems to conspire with their moods. Fennell leans fully into an operatic register and, for a while, the film soars on it. Visually, she remains one of the most inventive stylists in cinema. Cathy’s infamous “skin room,” all flushed pinks and fleshy tones, is both absurd and inspired, like living inside a body. As she grows older and wealthier through marriage to Edgar Linton, the well-meaning but bloodless heir to Thrushcross Grange, her dresses become more elaborate and suffocating with layers of lace and satin that turn her into a moving ornament. The Grange itself is all polished floors and fleshy walls, less home than showroom. A sequence of Cathy pacing these rooms, drowning in luxury and boredom while Heathcliff disappears from her life recalls Sofia Coppola’s portraits of gilded confinement. It is the image of a woman with every privilege and no power, waiting for men to decide the shape of her life.

When Heathcliff eventually returns, years later, mysteriously rich and newly polished, the plot slides into revenge. He courts Edgar’s sister Isabella as a weapon, insinuates himself into both households, and resumes his destructive orbit around Cathy. Fennell’s taste for excess is part of the pleasure here. The film is unabashedly horny, full of stolen encounters on the moors, in carriages, against stable walls and grand bedroom doors. Costumes play with latex and Matrix-style sunglasses like a music video spectacle. Charli XCX’s anachronistic soundtrack hums and throbs beneath it all, lending the story a pop delirium that feels mischievous rather than reverent. At its best, Wuthering Heights feels less like literary adaptation than feverish fan fiction, revelling in the sensual undercurrents that polite versions have long sanded down.

And yet the film’s boldness sometimes exposes its own soft spots.

Cathy’s brattiness and all-consuming obsession make perfect sense when she is seventeen. Transposed onto a woman in her mid-thirties, they become harder to believe. Margot Robbie plays her with conviction and intelligence, but the script doesn't reconcile the mature Cathy, married, installed as lady of the Grange, with the impulsive girl Brontë wrote. Her self-sabotage begins to feel less tragic than arbitrary. You find yourself asking practical questions the film cannot answer. Why doesn’t she simply choose Heathcliff when he returns? Why not leave with him, or refuse the marriage altogether?

That question becomes louder because Fennell never fully establishes the social rules that would make such a choice impossible. Much was made of Jacob Elordi’s casting, with accusations that Fennell was white-washing a character whose ambiguous ethnicity in the novel marks him as permanently other, the source of both his childhood abuse and his adult exclusion. Here, stripped of that context, his separation from Cathy feels abstract. He returns from years away rich, groomed, every inch the gentleman, and yet the option of running away with Cathy remains unthinkable without the film convincingly explaining why. There is a fleeting reference to another woman being hanged, a reminder of public punishment, but wealth appears to protect everyone we actually meet. Without a clear sense of consequence or danger, the lovers’ separation feels less fated than fabricated.

The same logic problem extends to the film’s much-advertised carnality. In a world where sex is happening everywhere, often in public and with little shame, Cathy and Heathcliff’s transgressive desire carries surprisingly few stakes. Their chemistry is palpable and often genuinely sexy, but it rarely feels dangerous. If everyone else is already indulging, what exactly are they risking?

Still, it is difficult to deny the film’s pull. Fennell directs with conviction and relish for the grotesque and the beautiful, that even her missteps are interesting ones. The young cast is superb, the landscapes intoxicating, the mood thick enough to taste. Images of moist dough being kneaded and slapped, the viscosity of eggs and slugs, jellied fish being penetrated all carry the same tongue-in-cheek sensuality she displayed in Saltburn, where longing makes the whole world feel tactile and obscene. Like that film, this one is messy, excessive, occasionally shallow, but undeniably alive.
In the end, this Wuthering Heights is less a definitive reading than a vivid, idiosyncratic riff, funnier and sexier than most adaptations, sometimes frustratingly light on depth, yet always watchable. Fennell treats Brontë not as sacred text but as raw material for her own gothic fantasia. You may wish for a little more psychological or social weight, a little more reason beneath the rapture, but there is something bracing about a filmmaker who would rather risk too much than too little.

Written and directed by Emerald Fennell, based on the novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography by Linus Sandgren. Edited by Victoria Boydell.

Starring Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Alison Oliver, Shazad Latif, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. 136 mins

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: