SYNOPSIS: “Moor, moor, moor. How do you like it?” “Wuthering Heights,” a reimagined take on Emily Brontë’s grand gothic tale of bodice-ripping and obsessive love, stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as lovers with an unbreakable bond. “Love twisted by time. Desire that won’t die.”
CAST: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell. Directed by Emerald Fennell.
REVIEW: More (or should that be “moor”) explicit than previous iterations of the Brontë classic, Emerald Fennell’s take on the story is a study in how obsessive love can lead to ruin.
Set in the late 1700s, Charlotte Mellington plays Catherine Earnshaw, the young, free-spirited daughter of Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), a booze-hound who brings home an illiterate, orphaned boy (“Adolescence” star Owen Cooper) from the city to the family’s decaying Yorkshire estate. She names him Heathcliff, after her dead brother, and they form a fast bond.
Cut to years later. Catherine and Heathcliff, now played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, are head over heels but Cathy desires the kind of social standing Heathcliff cannot provide.
Despite Heathcliff’s promise to “follow you like a dog to the end of the world,” she marries the refined gentleman Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a handsome rich man but without the intensity that defined her relationship with Heathcliff.
Rejected and devastated, Heathcliff leaves the only home and real love he has ever known, only to return five years later, wealthy and with revenge on this mind. “Why did you leave me?” she asks. “Why did you betray your own heart?” he replies.
Simply put, Emerald Fennell, the director of “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” has turned “Wuthering Heights” into something best described as a light “Fifty Shades of Bridgerton.”
Despite a reputation for pushing the envelope, Fennell seems restrained here, save for a brief scene of bizarre doggie-style degradation and the worst consent scene ever committed to film. Those moments are memorable for the kind of provocation and boundary-pushing we expect from the director. For much of the film’s runtime, however, she’s on a low simmer, stuck somewhere between the Brontë’s melancholic passion and the director’s usual decadent discomfort.
As the young Catherine and Heathcliffe, Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper provide a proper setup for the soul-deep connection to come. When the characters grow up Robbie and Elordi bring intensity but the heartfelt spark that lit the flame of passion years before is replaced by a romantic appetite that manifests itself in cruelty and muddled motivations.
At its most basic, Catherine and Heathcliffe straddle the thin line between love and hate, not an uncommon romantic position, but Fennell confusingly blurs the line into a gaping incoherent hole.
Robbie and Elordi look the part of impossibly beautiful star-crossed lovers, and they share chemistry, but their thirst for one another feels skin deep, even as it grows obsessive and destructive.
Like its stars, “Wuthering Heights” looks lovely—opulent interiors, moody moors—but the reimagination of Brontë’s novel feels lackluster, unable to truly grasp the passion or the tragedy inherent to the original story.
