This Cathy – Margot Robbie – is a knockout. She’s a star, she’s status-obsessed and in all her twinkling, bejewelled splendour she’s marvellously juxtaposed against the bleak, natural, cavernous expanse of the Yorkshire landscape. Heathcliff, rather, impeccably cast as Jacob Elordi (London’s object of desire after the biblical, rain-soaked premiere), blends more faithfully into the rugged, tempestuous scenery. A brute of elemental force. Their chemistry is sizzling. It’s all watchful, lingering glances that heat up and up and up in a burning crescendo. Their physical difference only serves to amplify this: Cathy the teeny-tiny pampered princess beside the coarse, rangy Elordi at 6ft 5in. She’s the femme fatale to our Byronic romantic hero.
The setting of rugged 18th-century West Yorkshire remains faithful while other aspects diverge – as Fennell’s quotation marks around the title give fair warning to. It’s goodbye to the second generation: Fennell has Marie Kondo’d the text, slimming it down to hone further into the central cataclysmic love story. The action is whittled down to Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), Cathy and Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, and nouveau riche siblings Edgar and Isabella Linton, played by Shazad Latif and Alison Oliver, at Thrushcross Grange, a pale blue whipped cream gateau of a place. Dark, draughty Wuthering Heights is in binary opposition to cushy, shiny Thrushcross, souped up with a dolls house replica, skin wallpaper (seriously), taxidermy lambs and classical urns filled with goldfishes. It’s kitsch-in-excelsis. The moors only serve as the bridging distance between the two poles.
There’s enough romance to satisfy even the most rapacious Romantasy readers in this Wuthering Heights
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture
Alison Oliver as Isabella is a prissy joy. Impeccably silly with a diminutive voice, always with her miniature dog tucked under her arm, she blends exquisitely into the overall ostentation of her dwelling. Her response to Heathcliff is primitive: edging her dress down to bare her shoulders in a gesture of promiscuity when he returns bent on revenge, an inexplicably rich man. Cathy and Isabella have a delicious face-off, in a scene visually comparable to Fragonard’s The Swing. ‘He’d crush you like a sparrow’s egg,’ Cathy whispers, vocal daggers, when Isabella expresses how handsome Heathcliff is. ‘You are a dog in a manger,’ Isabella retorts. It’s utterly glorious. Heathcliff’s sophisticated revenge calculation is well underway.