Wuthering Hots

Subtle, this movie is not.

As engorged as the well-hung hanging man who grunts and moans his last noose-choked breath under the opening credits, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights eagerly commingles sex and death to cheeky excess. No haunted spirits here, only sins of the flesh. A stiff with a stiffy sets the tone for this fervid, febrile 2020s fantasia of Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel.

Fluids gush through Fennell’s outré take on the famously self-destructive story of amorous obsession. Blood, sweat, tears, rain, saliva—all the better to lubricate. And so much penetration: fingers into mouths, tongues into orifices. It’s enough to make your book club blush.

Wuthering Heights ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Emerald Fennell
Written by: Emerald Fennell
Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell
Running time: 136 mins

Arguably literature’s most highbrow stableboy romance, Wuthering Heights chronicles the melodramatic pas de deux between impoverished aristocratic snob Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and hot-blooded house servant Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), both residing at her ancestral manor ensconced in the craggy highlands of North Yorkshire. They torture each other by respectively wooing their posh neighbors Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his needy naïve sister Isabella (Alison Oliver). The nouveau riche Lintons, flush with mercantile money from purveying velvet, are guileless in the face of Cathy and Heathcliff’s haughty depravity

Long before Cathy succumbs to Edgar’s gilded-cage security and Heathcliff seduces Isabella into a hate-fuck marriage, the two fell in love as wounded children. In Fennell’s version, Cathy’s abusive, alcoholic Papa (Martin Clunes) brings home a then-nameless Liverpudlian street urchin (Owen Cooper from Adolescence), who, smitten with Cathy, bears the brunt of the father’s drunken beatings to spare her any harm. “He shall be your pet,” Papa coos at young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) with a manipulative leer. She is the one to christen him Heathcliff, after her dead older brother.

Sorry, Brontë fans, Cathy’s bitter brother Hindley Earnshaw is nowhere to be found — a significant plot change that does, admittedly, streamline the narrative. And, as with most other cinematic adaptations, Fennell jettisons the book’s second half, in which Heathcliff bestows his misery and torment onto a new generation.

Instead, the Academy Award winning auteur (who won a screenwriting Oscar for her directing debut Promising Young Woman), goes easy on the plot points as a writer-director, although she does turn dutiful handmaid Miss Nellie (Hong Chau) into the illegitimate child of a nobleman. “Bastards can’t be ladies, Miss Nellie,” she’s told. And so she transforms into a conniving figure of quiet vengeance, playing a far more active role in Cathy and Heathcliff’s ultimate ruin.

Fennell otherwise lets extravagant artifice amplify her lovers’ expressionistic, hyperventilating emotions. Enlisting Saltburn production designer Suzie Davies and set decorator Charlotte Dirickx, she has concocted ravishingly surreal environs for the tortured players. Dilapidated Wuthering Heights, an imposing manor dating back to 1500, is in repugnant disrepair, with jutting, obsidian-shiny rock formations suffocating the exterior and wedging its way into the walls. The whole house is a chiaroscuro nightmare, with a high-gloss façade of pitch-black tiles and demonic diamond windows, ever menaced by the encroaching Penine fog.

In stark contrast, the Linton’s nearby estate Thrushcross Grange is a sumptuous Regency-style fever dream, with each opulent room a different color: shiny blood-red floors and snow-white walls in the main room, while the others boast red-velvet décor, blue quartz, fur, silver, and — in Cathy’s boudoir — floor-to-ceiling latex made to look like her own flesh. Fennell is quickly becoming the Ken Russell of lusty British feminist filmmakers, albeit with more of a couture eye: less provocative, more Agent Provocateur.

Wuthering or withering? This latest cinematic iteration, as blustery as its name, might also be a contemptuous sneer to all the self-serious English majors and prudish librarians who prefer their Heathcliff and Cathy to be more presentably swoony, like Laurence Oliver and Merle Oberon in William Wyler’s beloved 1939 version. Fair warning to those who can’t bear the sight of Cathy rubbing one out against a damp and peaty rock, then Heathcliff grabbing her hand to sniff and suck those wet digits. And don’t even mention the randy horseplay between two Earnshaw servants involving a bridle and a fair amount of bit-chomping.

Fennell’s film advertises itself as “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told,” while the first movie version from 1920 warned viewers of Brontë’s “Tremendous Story of Hate.” Both are true, which might just make this the kinkiest romp on the misty moors. “I am rough and cruel and cold… do you want me to stop?” says Heathcliff when, in a steady voice, he seduces Isabella by confessing how heartless he plans to be. The overheated ingenue emphatically wants him to keep going — even if it means being leashed like a dog. “I have finally found my match in degradation,” he observes with smug satisfaction.

Virtue is weakness, compassion is for suckers. Fennell sees this romance as pitiless, forbidden, self-wounding, status-conscious, and mixed up with fortunes both inherited and lost, earned and squandered. All those toxic aspects are in the book, but they’re cushioned by Brontë’s narrative propriety; here, though, they’re stripped bare and sharpened like daggers. Do Cathy and Heathcliff get their tragic comeuppance and final reunion? Sure, you sentimental suckers. But in this these heightened Heights, shame is the name of the game. And moral rot is hot.