Wuthering Heights, a withering catastrophe

By Staff Writer Kanupriya Goyal

Before the wind ever howls across the Yorkshire moors, director Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has already mistaken a tempest for depth. The movie has everything money can buy, with an $80 million budget lacquered across every frame, lending itself to lush cinematography and couture-level costuming. What emerges from the stylized wings of privileged prestige is a vapid aesthetic that strips Emily Bronte’s 1847 classic of its lattice of cyclical generational violence, racial trauma, relentless pursuit of vengeance, and social order, leaving behind a glorified romance so glib it borders on parody. 

The novel Wuthering Heights is an examination of the toxic obsessive relationship between Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw and Heathcliff as they embark on an all-consuming spiral of destruction that spans generations. Although the film is an adaptation, it seems to be almost entirely allergic to the novel it claims to honor. Adaptation by definition is transformation with perspicacity, but Fennell instead offers insulting diminution. For instance, she erases Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity by casting white Australian Jacob Elordi to play him. By eliminating his racial identity, she expunges the reasoning for his deep-rooted trauma and fury, as well as the violence he inflicts on future generations. Heathcliff isn’t Heathcliff without his race;  he’s a Hot Topic Byronic placeholder with all the complexity of a snazzy haircut and a hoop earring. 

This is merely the opening gambit in Fennell’s campaign of aesthetic vandalism, one she has defended with alacrity: “You can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” Fennell said in an interview with Hollywood Reporter. In later interviews, Fennell remarked that she chose Elordi because he resembled the illustration of Heathcliff from the very first copy of the novel she read, a justification so alarmingly childish it triggers a question: did Fennell construct this adaptation from the romantic longings of teenage perceptions? Had she revisited the text, she’d have most certainly noticed the novel’s explicit and repeated references to Heathcliff’s racial identity and consequential otherness. Instead, she stated that her 14 and 40-year-old selves view the story in the same way when asked what she thought of the novel, as if adolescent puppy-love and mature analysis are interchangeable currencies. It is no wonder Fennell thinks of the novel in the context of her teenaged self: the movie she’s produced has all the analytical rigour of a Wattpad fanfiction written by a pre-pubescent child. 

The casting catastrophe radiates incongruity from its very core. Bronte’s Heathcliff is a “dark-skinned gipsy” foundling whose ethnicity is the fuel that powers the novel’s narrative about the cyclical nature of abuse. In the movie, he is portrayed in a manner that warps Heathcliff’s striking otherness into the stereotypical, brooding Hollywood tragic hero. In an attempted noble show of chivalry, he drapes his sopping wet coat around Cathy (Margot Robbie) to keep her warm in the rain, displaying the kind of intelligence that is antithetical to book Heathcliff, yet encapsulates the vibe of the movie itself.

The villains fare even worse. Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), who, in the original, is an honourable, moral man, is here a pathetic, sniveling pushover, emasculated to the point of pity, allowing his wife’s ex-situationship to haunt the halls of Thrushcross Grange, engage in a torrid affair, and abscond with his sister without much reproach. Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) is similarly depicted as plain, wholly unsexed, and an advertent obstacle to these “star-crossed lovers” the audience is supposed to be rooting for. As one of the only two people of color cast for this film, this is a concerning decision that feeds into the stereotype of Asians as romantically undesirable. It also embodies the disposable POC trope: a common phenomenon where directors cast a POC love interest to highlight their white counterpart that the main character will end up with, while the POC is left humiliated and floundering, often unfoundedly.  In the novel, Edgar holds genuine appeal as a partner due to his social status, the financial stability he was able to offer Cathy, and his gentle character. However, the film reduces him to a woeful weakling and yet again strips away all nuance the novel possessed. To make matters worse, the idea that Nelly, a servant woman who possesses no power or prospects and has absolutely no financial-social failsafe beyond her employers, is the intended villain of Wuthering Heights is laughable at best. Yet the film attempts to hurtle down this breathtakingly lazy path to avoid disparaging the toxicity of Heathcliff and Cathy, people who are portrayed as irredeemably selfish in the novel. 

However, out of all the characters Fennell has sacrilegiously butchered, Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) may be the one most indicative of the ongoing literary crisis. It is incredibly insidious to take the extreme, violent abuse she endured and sexualize it. Isabella’s degradation is warped into a sick, perverted sexual game, dispatched via misogynistic caricature; she appears as voluntarily submissive, chained to the fireplace and crawling like a dog at Heathcliff’s command, grossly undermining the brutal domestic violence she experienced in the original classic. This is one of the parts of the film that directly undermines what Bronte was striving to communicate — all to prop up the so-called romance between Cathy and Heathcliff. Not surprisingly, it seems to fundamentally misunderstand what Wuthering Heights is at its core: a gothic revenge tragedy, not a love story. 

On the technical side, Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is, frame by frame, undeniably beautiful with a visually sumptuous production. The moors bloom in butter-soft light, and the costumes, while historically inaccurate, are quite flattering. Meanwhile, the mud on the peasants’ boots possesses more narrative substance than much of the dialogue, once again revealing the film’s commitment to aesthetics over depth. However, the soundtrack, to its credit, contributes a melancholy grandeur that the script cannot sustain, with the score by Charli XCX and Anthony Willis genuinely earning its keep. “House,” a neoclassical darkwave piece, sets an eerily ominous tone from the very onset and contributes to the unfurling of the narrative events. 

Admittedly, Robbie, Elordi, and the rest of the cast wring what they can from this dysfunctional trainwreck. Their chemistry is palpable, and the acting performances they delivered are ones to be applauded due to their intensity and depth of emotion displayed. Side characters such as young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), and Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) certainly earned their flowers as well, delivering striking performances that radiated the visceral intensity demanded of their scenes. 

Nonetheless, no amount of pretty cinematography or committed performances can disguise a story so brazenly misconstrued. For all its polish, the film is just that: gloss with nothing under its surface. If Bronte were alive today, she’d weep at seeing her life’s work reduced to erotica and two white Australians sticking their fingers in each other’s mouths with operatic solemnity. Perhaps the most accurate decision Fennell has made in her production of this film is placing Wuthering Heights in quotation marks on the movie poster because what she has created is not Wuthering Heights but Wuthering Whites.

Grade: F