At the center of this story is Mackey’s fully tapped-in performance. Her face does so much of the acting. Her reactions to preachy sermons and other stuffy sentiments aren’t necessarily meant to be seen by her peers but exist for the audience’s enjoyment. She holds little back, and when she does, it’s marvelous to see the wheels still turning as she struggles not to physically respond to something she finds abhorrent or ridiculous. Her chemistry with Jackson-Cohen is also electric, buried under many layers of thick clothing but even more potent because of its forbidden nature.
As a filmmaker, O’Connor shows an enthusiasm for detail and an emphasis on character, channeling her admiration for Brontë and her signature work through a love letter to a woman misunderstood and underappreciated in her time. Mackey and other cast members have great comic timing, but, despite its frequent humorous moments, this is not a comedy. Instead, it’s a snapshot of a spark that fueled a woman born into a time that wasn’t ready to accept her as she was and who might have gone on to do even more remarkable things had her life not been cut short by illness. There is plenty stuffed into the 130-minute runtime, a fitting tribute to an author who has now, so many years after her death, finally earned the acclaim that should have been visited upon her during her life. (Abe Friedtanzer)
The images of rural life and landscape in Wuthering Heights (2011) and of Midwestern urban sprawl in American Honey (2016) are as rich and varied as anything in the picturesque tradition. But it’s monstrosity as much as moorland which seems to have drawn Arnold to Wuthering Heights. To what extent, Brontë asks, does the physical and psychological abuse Heathcliff suffered as a child – ‘enough to make a fiend of a saint’, according to Nelly Dean – explain or even justify his subsequent sadism? Arnold furthers the novel’s preoccupation with the starkness of cruelty by discarding its convoluted second half. Her decision to cast Black actors as young and older Heathcliff (Solomon Glave and James Howson respectively) leaves contemporary audiences in no doubt that the man returning in triumph with a valise full of cash was once treated like a slave. Unfussy flashbacks to that earlier condition of servitude – and the happiness it barred him from – provide a measure of explanation, at least, for the physical and psychological punishments he now inflicts with such relish. But their vicious sadism nonetheless stands out in vivid relief. As the film ends, Heathcliff watches young Hareton Earnshaw, no doubt keen to impress the new master, stringing up some puppies from a gatepost in order to watch them die slowly. There’s only one person he could have learned that trick from. The master seems to approve. (David Trotter)
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