Who knew Isabella Linton was the best character in Wuthering Heights? She is in this vapid Brontë adaptation, anyway, a film that is enlivened briefly whenever she appears on screen, wickedly played by Alison Oliver. Otherwise, with a chemistry-free central romance between the bizarrely uninteresting Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie, also the film’s producer), this film self-deflates.
There are conspicuous longueurs and characterisations that barely reflect the complexity of an Instagram reel let alone the greatest gothic novel in English literature. It is the first unfortunate stumble in the film-making ascent of the Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell (Saltburn and Promising Young Woman).
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Back to Isabella, though, who is the heiress of the swanky Yorkshire mansion Thrushcross Grange and an enthusiast of BDSM practices that include canine-themed submission and stuff with chains. This is, obviously, a striking departure from the novel, yet appropriate for an adaptation that arrives with ironic quotation marks around the title. Literary pedants be warned: there is maybe 10 to 15 per cent of the original narrative in the movie, while the rest belongs to Fennell’s reimagined and self-described “fever dream”. It is, at best, Brontë adjacent but with a naff dollop of the Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James.
Isabella eventually falls for the swarthy, dominant Heathcliff of neighbouring, gloomy Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff has spent a water-treading opening act enjoying topless wood-chopping and photogenic mid-distance scowling before flouncing off huffily into the wilderness when his lifelong crush, Cathy, accepts the marriage proposal of the rich toff Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).
Heathcliff soon returns, however, showcasing a fabulous new tan and a pirate-themed glow-up (earring, gold tooth etc). Fennell’s glossy pop-promo aesthetic worked wonders for the satirical Saltburn (remember Barry Keoghan’s climactic nude boogie?) but too often here she simply plonks Elordi before the camera, cranks up the tunes (mostly Charli XCX) and seemingly hopes for the best. She has doomed Elordi with a fatally shallow characterisation, recasting Heathcliff as pouty man-candy with a shaky Yorkshire accent and, by chuffing ’eck, an alarmingly overexposed tongue.
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Yes, there is no person or inanimate object safe in a film where Fennell’s main directorial note to Elordi seems to have been, “Great, but can you also lick it?” And so with titter-inducing idiocy this Heathcliff “erotically” licks the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom, he licks her cheek when she’s attempting to cry and, worst of all, in a sequence that’s pure David Attenborough, he licks the length of her neck like a gecko working diligently through a string of dried crickets. This, remember, is a character who once dug his dead lover out of the ground with his bare hands (sorry, in the book, not in the film) but here commands only an egregious loss of credibility.
Cathy isn’t much better. Robbie is 35 and her age might have been an insurmountable issue had this been a good-faith adaptation (the literary Cathy is a teenager). But here it’s only mildly perplexing, prompting questions about why Cathy only began flirting with Heathcliff in her thirties.
Robbie with Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton
WARNER BROS
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More importantly, Robbie is an imposing actress and her costumes, from the designer Jacqueline Durran, are impressive. But her Cathy lives entirely on the surface like Brontë Barbie and never burns from the core like, say, the Cathy of Merle Oberon (from the 1939 version), or like Emma Mackey in the brilliant Emily (2022), there playing Emily Brontë but simultaneously, and this is the point, playing Cathy.
The rest of the film is equally imprecise. The production design is ramshackle — a bit of brutalism here, a bit of Tim Burton there, some location shooting and lots of ugly CGI. And the ending is hobbled by a shamefully trite “best bits” megamix.
Still, Oliver’s Isabella is a hoot and a bright light. She even winks to the camera as if she’s in on the joke — as if she knows it’s awful.
★★☆☆☆
15, 136min
In cinemas from Feb 13
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