One more day in Wuthering Heights land.
Some reviews:
Regardless of its shortcomings in characterization and storytelling, the film is very beautiful, with the music being especially noteworthy. The score by Anthony Willis is gorgeous and haunting, perfectly complementing various shots of rainy Yorkshire Moors. Charli xcx contributed an album of original songs, such as “House,” which plays at the beginning of the film and was also released as a single in 2025. The song captures the horror and claustrophobia of Catherine’s childhood through eerie instrumental distortion as the lyric “I think I’m gonna die in this house” is repeated, proving that modern spins on classics can work if the emotional core of the story is maintained.
Without the unique score capturing the internal turmoil of the characters, though, the movie would feel even more like an exercise in style over substance. This is in part because of the costumes, which are colorful, striking yet not historically accurate at all. A lack of historical accuracy is not inherently problematic if it is clear that is not what the director is attempting to do. Fennell has made that clear by virtue of the costumes being so extravagant, intentionally breaking with the period of the film to convey her unique artistry. Corsets, latex, transparent puffed sleeves and more are paired together in every color of the rainbow. However, Robbie’s acting is not strong enough to match the flashiness of the costumes, and as such she is often overshadowed by her own dresses.
Realistically, Emerald Fennell does not owe Emily Brontë that much in terms of beat-for-beat replication. A film is not a novel, and directors should be allowed to imbue a story with their own vision. Plenty of people will no doubt be driven to read the book after watching this movie, and that alone should be seen as a great success. Nevertheless, after those said people read the book, they might come to the conclusion that Fennell’s version pales in comparison. (Grace Traxler)
Coming in, I was unsure about this film, but I left the theater pleasantly surprised. One might think that the film’s deviations from the source material would be detrimental, but Fennell’s decision to shift the focus of the film to just their romance works remarkably well.
Through and through, it’s a good adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” that is worth the time and would not have Emily Brontë rolling in her grave. Despite the differences from the book, at its core it is still a movie about the heated obsession of two lovers, and perhaps Brontë would appreciate the focus on emotional intensity over strict fidelity to the plot. (Kahlil Kambui)
As Heathcliff, Elordi is perfectly enticing while also being outwardly savage. From his physical presence to his deep voice, audiences can see why Cathy is so torn. In the final act of the movie, I felt deeply disturbed by the savagery of Heathcliff, kudos to Elordi for his performance there.
Robbie, however, delivers the movie’s star performance. She layers Cathy with deliberate cruelty, allowing her to be deeply unlikeable when the story needs it, but in the next moment Robbie softens Cathy into a childlike vulnerability. It’s a performance that captures the instability at the heart of Cathy, making even her most destructive decisions feel believable.
This ‘Wuthering Heights’ is designed as spectacle. It invites division rather than agreeance, daring audiences to either surrender to its vision or reject it. Either way, it leaves people wanting to discuss it. While this adaptation may not honour every word of Brontë’s novel, it commits wholeheartedly to its own interpretation.
For Brontë purists, that may be unforgivable but for those willing to embrace spectacle over loyalty, it’s a haunting, divisive, and undeniably captivating reimagining. (Emily Chate)
Embodying exactly what a 14-year-old would want to watch on a Friday night, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” excels at playing a mawkish interpretation of the story. By eliminating the guarded nature of Catherine and Healthcliff’s sensuality, there is a yawning gap in the story’s structure.
While the film’s boldness and experimentation of style is at the root of its detriment, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is undeniably the most daring imagining of the classic yet. (Molly Tursi)
It’s all about maximalist adolescent interpretations of conflict – what you might call an insight into how the youth might first receive a morally gray story. Those that love the novel are unlikely to be satisfied – as I was never satisfied with any version of “My Cousin Rachel” – but there is rich psychological value in the contrasts Fennell’s version is able to exploit. (Rance Collins)
Instead of a faithful adaptation of the original “Wuthering Heights,” with complex political and social themes, Fennell created a reimagined version that focuses on making the audience feel the effects of being a part of the toxic and intense romance between Catherine and Healthcliff. For those who want a film honoring the original book, Fennell’s adaptation may be something to skip, but for viewers with a love for the passionate, toxic bond between Catherine and Heathcliff… this film is for them. (Maya Peoples)
What, Wuthering Heights with no ghost?
All in all, it was febrile, adolescent, overblown and hormonal. The slightly stately, middle-aged Edgar Linton – who should be the same age as Cathy and like the ‘cutest’ member of a non-threatening boyband if you’re going with the adolescent girl’s fantasy angle, was dad-coded when he should have been Mark-Owen-in-the-2000s coded.
It’s an excellent concept, to make a Brontë film that is like a piece of juvenilia – dolls in a dolls’ house acting out the story in a febrile, adolescent kind of way. The Brontës are, after all, famous for their juvenilia. They made up whole worlds – Gondal and Angria. Angrier is what I got, as this film trundled on. Because it seems like such a missed opportunity and a waste of some brilliant actors and source material.
I laughed and I (almost) cried with laughter but probably not where the director wanted me to. There were a few decent laughs in there, but I suspect most people don’t go to see “Wuthering Heights” for laughs. I was entertained but not, I suspect, in the way I was supposed to be. (Pen Hemingway)
The problem comes with the delusive methods of marketing and the implications of making this movie and calling it “Wuthering Heights.” The movie cover is being put on Emily Brontë’s novel. This act is extremely misleading and disrespectful to the original story.
The movie was interesting and held my attention the whole time. The movie is quite worth seeing if you want to be entertained, as long as you go in aware that it is hardly a romance and it is certainly not Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” (Makenna Cable)
These visuals combine with a synth soundtrack by pop sensation Charli XCX, with the opening song “House” featuring John Cale becoming a meme before the film even released. The rest of the tracks are suitable for both a sprint on the moors and a club set. I will give Charli the credit that her music is good, but it often creates more of an ambience than the dialogue does.
And because of this, it is safe to say “Wuthering Heights” is a film far more concerned with looking good than being good. (Danielle Bartholet)
In her own messy but literate way, she is exploring human capacity for vulgarity and, in turn, pushing mass audiences to the edge into a sometimes tantalizing, sometimes exhausting zone of entertainment and embarrassment. One might suspect that “crowd-pleasing” would be the greatest insult you could throw at her films; still, audiences seem to, well, lap them up. “Wuthering Heights” may also hit a nerve.
Fennell clearly has so many ideas swirling around, which is fitting for a story like “Wuthering Heights.” And yet as a viewing experience, it is an undernourishing feast, neither dangerous nor hot enough. (Lindsey Bahr)
Meanwhile, Fennell’s knowledge as a movie lover is on full display. Bold primary colors pop off the screen with reds, blues and yellows brightly lit amid the dark shadows and dreary black clothes and sets, looking more like the early Technicolor productions from Golden Age Hollywood. Several shots and scenes even recreate famous moments from “Gone With the Wind,” along with references to other famous movie romances such as the 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” — it being directed by Joe Wright, who has acted in two of his other movies, is no coincidence.
With no way for Heathcliff and Cathy to go to therapy in the 1800s, their own untreated mania continues to drive the story in entertaining ways. They say the best revenge is living well, but Heathcliff can only live well by exacting revenge on both the Earnshaws and Linton families, addicted not to loving Cathy but to the pain and pleasure that comes from it. Not a love story — a hate story. (Kellen M. Quigley)
In its praise, the film looks and sounds great. The stunning visuals and beautifully haunting soundtrack by Charli XCX help elevate the twisted whirlwind of emotions between the two lovers.
So this, while being a good film, tells a different story from the novel. It would be more fitting to call this 'Catherine' than Wuthering Heights. (Marketing-wise, I get it.) It has the emotional core, the passion and doom between both lovers, but it does not reach the heights of the original material. This film feels like something made for someone who only heard about Wuthering Heights or listened to the Kate Bush song without knowing what it is actually about. It's all wind and no heights. (Khanaphot Saengchai)
Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a glorious, frustrating mess of a film. The sumptuous production captivates with its broad visually romantic strokes, the director putting her distinctive stamp on the Emily Bronte classic in using a vibrant and, at times brooding, aesthetic that’s never less than captivating. And yet, the overall effect is brought low by Fennell’s tendency to go too far, shocking the viewer for shock’s sake with radical additions and alterations that either produce head-scratching moments or feelings of disgust. The end result is a curious disappointment that, ironically, despite its flaws, still proves haunting. (Chuck Koplinski)
If Fennell’s goal with “Wuthering Heights” was to make something beautiful to look at, she succeeded, although after a while, the glittery montages start to feel a little bit masturbatory and the no-nudity sex scenes lose their edge. As the film neared its end, I found myself missing the novel’s whip-smart dialogue and exploration of love beyond just sex.
That’s why, at the end of the day, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is the cinematic equivalent of empty calories. If the original novel is a plate of vegetables, the film is a 10-tier cake topped with whipped cream and cherries. It looks beautiful, and the frosting tastes sweet, but cut that cake open and it’s hollow — and now you have a cavity for nothing.
When I left the theater after seeing “Wuthering Heights,” I began to wonder if I’d been too harsh on Brontë’s novel. Maybe it deserved three and a half stars. Perhaps even four. That’s what a bad film adaptation will do — it’ll make you realize that yeah, the book was better, even if it wasn’t all that good to begin with. (Elsa Englebert)
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” is for the doom scrollers. Those who take things at face value, those who haven’t held a paperback since high school. It is a film designed for passive consumption, rewarding viewers not for their attention but for their recognition. Sure, the names are the same. The setting is the same. The outline, vaguely, remains intact. But the obsession, the cynicism, the very thing that made “Wuthering Heights,” well, “Wuthering Heights,” is nowhere to be found. (Emma Brandenburg)
The film isn’t that much fun to watch because we’re constantly hoping the romance would kick-in and set our hearts afire, but instead only provides random sparks. (Mike Poulos)
The Independent asks several literary experts for their verdict on the film. We are always for asking people who really know what they are talking about (rather than the poor, unfortunate, attention-seeking souls of socials) and always in Lucasta Miller's team:
Among those weighing in is Lucasta Miller, a distinguished British author, editor, and critic renowned for her study of the Brontë sisters and her preface to the Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights. Having viewed Fennell’s interpretation, Ms Miller remains largely unperturbed by the director’s departures from the source material.
"It would be meaningless to criticise it for that, just as it would be to criticise a grand opera that plays fast and loose with the plot," Ms Miller stated. "I wasn’t asking for a faithful adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ but whether it works on its own terms. And my sense is that it does." [...]
Claire O'Callaghan, a Brontë scholar and senior lecturer at Loughborough University, acknowledged the controversy surrounding casting. "All adaptations choices in terms of casting that don’t always fit character or character descriptions — and this film has certainly been in the spotlight for that reason," she observed. Regarding Robbie’s portrayal, Ms O’Callaghan added, "In terms of Cathy, I was sceptical initially, but having seen the film, it is a good performance, and Margot Robbie really brings out Cathy’s spoiled and selfish nature in ways that other adaptations have paid less attention to." [...]
"Some TV versions have attempted to capture the whole book, as have some films, like the 1992 adaptation (starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche)," Ms O’Callaghan explained. "But what film and TV can’t do is maintain the ambiguity in Emily’s novel — the fact that her book is both a tragic love story and a revenge novel and a tragedy. Film and TV tend to focus on one of those for clarity and to focus dramatic tension." [...]
Ms Miller likened the film to a "stylised and extravagant" fairy tale, praising Fennell’s "quite insightful" use of such language. Ms O’Callaghan found it "quite Tim Burton-esque in its surreal perspective." Despite its radical departure from the novel, she concluded, "I still found it entertaining even if I’m unsure if I’d claim to like it." (Hillel Italie)
A contributor to
The New Yorker makes a great point about the film and its potential consequences as 'Heralding the Revival of the Film Romance'.
What’s lovable about it is love itself: Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is an unabashedly romantic movie emerging at a time when few such films are being made—at least, for theatrical release and by directors with some artistic cachet. It’s unlikely that many viewers have been fretting about the quality of the adaptation, and I’m in sympathy with such indifference, whether it arises from not having read the novel on which the film is based or just not caring about (literary) fidelity. Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education; it’s a matter of judging a movie on the basis of a principle, even a prejudice (and the pride that goes with it), rather than on experience. Yes, I also sometimes compare films with their literary source and criticize them on that basis, but I also know why I do so: not to protect that source (even the worst filmmakers aren’t burning the books, just misunderstanding them) but to complain that the movie isn’t as good as the book itself and to try to figure out why not. [...]
What Fennell chiefly adds is something that could hardly have been in a novel published in 1847: sex. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, apparently unconsummated in Brontë, is a hot-blooded affair in the movie. [...]
The effect is to demythologize Brontë. If all that impeded the characters’ sex lives in the book were the law and decorum of the author’s day, why not tell something like the truth? If one revisits the past to dispel myths, one worth dispelling is that of a lost era of chastity. But that’s not what Fennell does. Instead of lifting the lid off history and anchoring the adapted parts of “Wuthering Heights” in the specifics of the period when they’re set (roughly from the American Revolution to the French one), Fennell turns history decorative, decks it out in material fantasies so awkward that it’s unclear whether they are deliberate anachronisms or whether they’re just off.
The overwhelming silliness of the movie falls short of camp—it’s neither intentionally self-parodic nor exaggeratedly theatrical. On the contrary, even its most outlandish and grotesque inventions are portrayed tastefully, with a sheen of aesthetic refinement that turns the most intensely emotional moments into emblems of emotion. The film’s pictorial expression remains under the top. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” isn’t a bad adaptation, just a banal movie, no worse in what it takes from Brontë than in what it tacks on.
Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to Fennell’s effort, because what she really appears to be adapting is less Brontë than a cinematic genre that has more or less fallen into oblivion: the romantic drama. Though mediocre in itself, “Wuthering Heights” is a kind of placeholder, a symbol of an entire swath of filmmaking that now hardly exists but has been newly brought back to the fore by the ample and ubiquitous archive of streaming. Such movies were long known in Hollywood as “women’s pictures” (even if many of the romantic agonies afflicted the movie’s men, too). The genre’s supreme artists were John M. Stahl (from the silent era through the nineteen-forties) and Douglas Sirk (in the nineteen-fifties), and they were joined by other directors of similar ambition and accomplishment, such as Frank Borzage and George Cukor. Their melodramas of heartbreak and redemption, as in Stahl’s “Only Yesterday” (based on a novella by Stefan Zweig), Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows,” filled with wild coincidences and fervent confessions, are what could be called tearjerkers. These movies have the extraordinary merit of putting the passions of love and the obstacles to relationships front and center, balancing personal desires and social obligations on an equal footing, and thereby lending bourgeois life the grandeur of tragedy. [...]
What Fennell has purchased, so to speak, with the adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” isn’t just a romantic template but a repudiation of any social consciousness: the content-free, history-free, politics-free populism of a movie about nothing but romance. [...]
That’s why, for all the artistic inadequacy of “Wuthering Heights,” I’m cheered by the prospect of its box-office success. Profit breeds emulation, and if romance is back other filmmakers are likely to take it on. Maybe they’ll find a way to do so with a more ample, honest context and a more imaginative style to give it form—to help love find its place in the world and vice versa. (Richard Brody)
Thought Catalog's hot take is that 'The ‘Wuthering Heights’ Hate Has Gone Too Far'.
Overall, I thought the movie was weird, kinda messed up and very aesthetically pleasing.
The fan reactions I read after leaving the movie were much more negative. A lot of the discourse focused on the character of Isabella and how the character is treated by Heathcliff. Imagine my surprise when I watched 1992’s Wuthering Heights with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff and discovered that she is treated just as poorly in that adaptation! (Emily Madriga)
PSA: ‘Morally gray’ is not a healthy character trait, and domestic violence is never sexy. There is a fine line between love and obsession, and Wuthering Heights remains firmly in the latter category. The movie is based on Emily Brontë’s classic novel by the same name and is essentially an uncomfortable display of aggression masquerading as a slow burn love story. Timing the release for Valentine’s Day, these filmmakers clearly wanted to produce the romance of the year, but they critically misread the source material and wound up romanticizing infidelity and coercion instead. [...]
All that to say, Wuthering Heights was never meant to be the greatest love story of all time. Emily Brontë wrote a complex tale of yearning, yes, but of violence and incest too. The best way to enjoy this movie is to view it as a piece of provocative art rather than a faithful interpretation of classic literature. And if your friends walk away from this movie singing Heathcliff’s praises, please check in on them. (Gia Lish)
Filmogaz uses it to discuss the literary adaptation question.
Many critics argue the new film trims the novel’s merciless edges. Scenes of coercion, domestic violence and the slow rot of abuse that ripple across generations in the book are, in this rendition, less present or less morally complicated. By making the central pair more conventionally sympathetic and excusing or aestheticizing harm, reviewers contend the adaptation loses the tension that makes the original story both disturbing and unforgettable.
Supporters counter that this is a deliberate, interpretive choice: a fantasia that extracts a single emotional register — eroticism and yearning — and amplifies it. Detractors maintain that without the moral ambiguity and savagery Brontë wrote, the story can’t fully be called Wuthering Heights.
The release has crystallized a broader question about literary adaptation: how much fidelity to a novel’s darkness is necessary for a film to truthfully carry its name? For now, audiences are sorting themselves along predictable lines — those who are happy to trade some of the book’s discomfort for cinematic immediacy, and those who see that bargain as a betrayal of what made the source material strange and essential. (Riley Calderon)
Vulture wonders whether 'Fennell’s Tumblrized Wuthering Heights [is] Worth Seeing'. A clip on
CBC discusses 'The problem with Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights adaptation'.
IndieWire has spoken to production designer Suzie Davies:
The two gin monoliths, like so much of the visual design of the film, gave production designer Suzie Davies and her team the chance to reach the apex of a feeling — whether anger, sadness, despair, or desire. Fennell wrote into the script that Earnshaw would meet his end surrounded by mountains of empty bottles, but it was on Davies to translate that into a reality — or at least as much of a reality for the world of the often unreal, dreamlike, and deliberately artificial-looking “Wuthering Heights.”
“Oh my God, that was such fun to do!” Davies told IndieWire. “We had a fantastic team of model makers doing all sorts of wonderful things [to make] these giant bottles of booze. I think I’d made it about five-foot high, up to the windows. I thought, ‘That’s a lot of gin.’ We’d been practicing it because, obviously, on a schedule, you can’t just dress those in. They’re actually on a rig, and we wanted to get light behind them so it’s hollow behind. [And] Emerald just said, ‘I think we need more.’” [...]
Davies said that the monstrous nature of those sky-high bottle piles is not only a visual match for Earnshaw and the horror of what a drunk he was. It’s also part of the way that the Wuthering Heights house disintegrates into wreck and ruin. “We wanted the omnipresence of nature taking over in all forms. It’s coming from the mountain, it’s coming from all sides, it’s coming from the ground. Everything was just the heaviness and pressure of that building and the uncomfortable nature of what’s going on in that world,” Davies said.
By this point in the film, Davies and her team had already done a lot of work, giving the space an emotional trajectory similar to Cathy and Heathcliff’s self-destruction over their feelings for each other. Freed from any sort of period accuracy, Davies tried to start the house in a spartan, memory-like state, as Cathy and Heathcliff would remember it from childhood. “There’s not really an oven. There’s not the usual accoutrements of a kitchen. It’s very bare,” Davies said. “But I love that when Heathcliff and Isabella [Alison Oliver] take over, it’s just layers upon layers of dead animals and food and drink and shapes. It was great to do.”
Whether working with the brooding ruin of the Wuthering Heights house or the glossy red corridors in Thrushcross Grange, Davies was guided by the same principles, which Fennell laid out in a phone call to Davies before she sent the production designer the script. “The idea that it was gonna be about a feeling more than anything. It’s like the architecture of feeling that we needed to design, rather than the architecture of the period,” Davies said.
“You’re just given this opportunity to safely make crazy decisions,” Davies said. “Although it’s [Emerald’s] story, she’s happy [for everyone to have], and expects everyone to have an opinion, and suggestions. So it’s not, like, ‘Do it this way.’ It’s like, ‘This is what I’m after. What can you do?’ You end up building this visual language that, luckily, over two films [including ‘Saltburn’], I feel like I sort of know her groove,” Davies said. “She pushes me in a direction I would not normally go, and it’s just brilliant for a creative role to have that freedom to just go a little bit crazy.” (Sarah Shachat)
NPR looks into fan communities colliding around Wuthering Heights.
While I waited for the release of Wuthering Heights, I grew curious about the intersection of reading and listening to music at a time when high romance has taken over far more than Emerald Fennell's fancy. I cast my net for other playlists and discussions about music to read by. I found much more than I expected — and frankly, I expected a lot. While my own taste in genre fiction runs more to murder than romance or fantasy, I'm fascinated by the burgeoning subcultures keeping bookstores — and, arguably, publishing — alive through their avid pursuit of all things wild, dark and spicy. What I've learned in my limited research is that these intersecting communities of readers do much more to celebrate their affinities than drop reviews on Goodreads; for many, reading is the heart of a sparkling creative lifestyle. And music is a big part of the cozy bibliophile's world. (Ann Powers)
On a podcast,
The New Statesman wonders: 'Wuthering Heights is a disgusting film, but is it a love story?'
Slate also discusses the film on a podcast.
HuffPost looks into how 'Wuthering Heights Has Made Us Feral For Yearning. The Reality Isn't As Hot'. Behind a paywall,
The Wall Street Journal claims that the movies is a 'millenial fantasy'.
The Gloss goes 'behind The Scenes Of Hair And Make-Up'.
Publishers' Weekly highlights the fact that the film has book clubs 'swooning' for the book.
Wuthering Heights events, watch parties, and meetups have taken over bookish corners across New York, including Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s “book club screenings” inviting “readers, rereaders, and mild obsessives” to debrief and delight in Fennell’s screen candy; Liz’s Book Bar’s Valentine’s Day event featuring special editions of the book and locally-curated florals; and pre-screenings for book influencers hosted by intimacy brands.
Possessiveness over the classic—accompanied, inevitably, by the belief that its significance escapes modern readers—has inspired widespread ire over the film. If people are only going to encounter Brontë's work through Fennell’s adaptation, the line of thought goes, then Wuthering Heights deserves something less, well...moist.
But what many outside of publishing circles may not realize is that people are reading the book—not just any people, but the sort of people whom classics gatekeepers are most worried about.
Book clubs new and old have picked up Brönte's Wuthering Heights in recent months. Emily Brontë's sales on Circana BookScan have already surpassed 100,000 units in the first two months of this year, compared to just over 180,000 units in all of 2025. A decent number, like that of romance publisher 831 Stories, operate in the orbit of online romance communities.
831's Wuthering Heights group read, which it ran through Substack with online book club Belletrist, launched with the steamy trailer for Fennell's take embedded in-line with the announcement. 831 cofounder Claire Mazur said they knew a lot of people would be talking about the book, and they wanted to make it feel more "manageable" to approach.
Their group read broke down the book into weekly chunks and ran a chat for resource-sharing and discussion. Threads on the characters' motivations and marriage—occasionally collapsing into modern romance-trope shorthand—ensued. Mazur said that participants found the book quite sexy, "even without it being really explicit on the page."
Though a small number of readers were disparaged to find that sexiness was of the repressed, brooding variety, most approached comparisons to Fennell's interpretation with genuine curiosity or humor. Brontë, for instance, often uses "ejaculate"—meaning a sharp utterance—in her dialogue tags. Near the end of the group read, one subscriber wrote, "I have a feeling this new movie is going to be nothing like the book."
After viewing the film, romance author Rebecca F. Kenney, who penned her own "spicy" Brontë spinoff entitled Ruthless Devotion (Sourcebooks Casablanca) in 2025, told PW that it was "wild, vicious, and glorious as the original." Fennell "gave me things I craved that weren't in the original, except maybe hinted at," she added.
It may be true that, as St. Martin's editor Vanessa Aguirre told PW, these readers are devouring Wuthering Heights as a "dark romance," which combines Gothic aesthetics, "big feelings," and "angst" to vindicate a morally grey affair as true love. But the words on the page also resist these frameworks. Brontë's story is irrevocably tragic, as Lipton rightly noted.
Many other book clubs are using the lustful for the film as an excuse to revisit Brontë's bad romance. The New York Times and New York Public Library both ran Wuthering Heights book clubs with the express intention of considering its new place in the zeitgeist. When Vogue launched its book club in January and announced Wuthering Heights as its first pick, staff culture writer Emma Specter wrote that the "Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi of it all" was welcome, but not central, to the discussion.
Former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones also chose Wuthering Heights as the first title for her new Substack book club, which is suffused with the chic intellectualism of glossy magazines. Jones, who holds a PhD in English from Columbia, writes posts that are conversational without sacrificing analytical rigor, discussing "why Emily Brontë's windswept romance is actually a novel of revenge," the trope of the orphan, and the deceptiveness of its "tempestuous teenage" appearance.
After viewing a pre-screening of the film, Jones returned to her Substack with a list of spoiler-free notes on Fennell's "choices with respect to the novel." It's hopeful to hear her idealism about book clubs, the way they can cut through the myopia of individual readings and redraw well-worn lines of criticism.
"I think anything that gets people together to talk about books is high on my list of excellent cultural situations," Jones told PW.
Jones doesn't pretend to know the "fortuitous" circumstances behind Wuthering Heights's ascent. (Sam Spratford)
The Economist republishes its own 1848 original review of the novel.
A most strange and mysterious story, calculated to excite any other feelings than those of pleasure; interesting, it certainly is, but the interest is not a pleasing one. It possesses considerable affinity to “Jane Eyre”, edited by Currer Bell, noticed in one of our late numbers, but wants its vivacity and its pathos.
The principal character, Heathcliff, resembles in no slight degree the Rochester of “Jane Eyre”: he has all Rochester’s failings, but none of his virtues; he is passionate, and bears malice; all who offend him are ruined both in purse and mind, though years elapse before his plans are matured and carried out. His nature is all darkness; and he stoops to anything to gain his purpose.
Originally, he is brought into the family of the proprietor of Wuthering Heights from the streets; he is there ill used by the son, petted and loved by the daughter, and strongly loving her in return; but, when the daughter is about to marry a neighbour’s son, stung by a sense of her unkindness, and the general ill treatment he has received, he runs away. The daughter marries, and after some years Heathcliff returns: several scenes ensue between his former companion and himself—she dies broken hearted—he marries her sister-in-law, and succeeds in his attempts to gain possession of the whole of the property of his former benefactor: he ill-treats his wife; she flies from him, and dies when her son is about 12 years old.
Heathcliff obtains possession of his son, and, by a succession of cold-blooded stratagems and lies, succeeds in marrying him to the daughter of his former love. The son dies soon after the marriage, and the young widow ultimately marries the grandson of the first proprietor of Wuthering Heights, who had been allowed to run wild about the house in his youth, and made to work as a common labourer on the property. The story closes with the death of Heathcliff who, after making restitution, dies a hardened infidel.
Such is a very brief outline of “Wuthering Heights”. The story is connectedly told, and the characters are well and vividly portrayed; but we cannot say that the sketches of the strong, hardened in wickedness, and of the weak, led away into sin, are subjects of pleasing interest.
AV Club is one of those having trouble with the fact that many adaptations of something can coexist and are not self-excluding. It claims that 'Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights remains the novel's truest adaptation'.
In Brontë’s novel, fireplaces do not warm but “blaze,” while winds do not blow but “roar,” and the mood of a room may be likened to a “tempest” and the snow-covered moors to a “billowy, white ocean.” It’s a language of primal force—apt for Brontë’s world, with its pitiless nature and casual violence—and of an almost adolescent emotional intensity that matches that of its young protagonists. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights speaks the same language. Usually favoring a charged, handheld naturalism for her working-class stories set in contemporary suburban spaces, Arnold adapts her style here to suit rural 18th-century Yorkshire. Between scenes of non-professional performers and earthy character actors exchanging terse period dialogue, there are shuddering images, perhaps all snatched on the fly—a colossal tree quaking in a gale; a ferocious, panting dog chasing another through mud on the Earnshaw farm; birds flying in formation across a foreboding grey sky. Abandoning any period-piece classicism—that stately form so often used to translate classic texts like Wuthering Heights to film—in favor of an elemental cinema vérité, Arnold approximates Brontë’s wild poetry, in image and sound, like no other filmmaker.
Thematically, too, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights gets closer to the source text than most. Many Wuthering Heights adaptations foreground the bitter romance while other concerns became less prominent, but for Arnold as for Brontë, the love between Cathy and Heathcliff is but the poisoned heart of a larger story. Echoing Arnold’s work at large, 2011’s Wuthering Heights is, like Brontë’s novel, also about young people coming uneasily of age in an adult world, about the long consequences of violence and neglect, about how people are forged by their environments. A social realist filmmaker, Arnold (like Brontë) sympathizes with those on the delicate fringes of society, and understands that Heathcliff is not merely a smoldering romantic antihero, but a damaged, destructive individual whose character has been informed by his class, his gender, and—perhaps above all—his race. [...]
Even so, what’s remarkable about Arnold’s film is not how often it departs from Brontë’s text but how closely it aligns with it. The 2011 Wuthering Heights might have little of the shine of other, supposedly more reverential adaptations, but Brontë’s novel doesn’t suggest polish or cry out for reverence. Its language is fervent and untamed, its story not pretty but knotted and frequently cruel. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a radical adaptation, and one that after so many interpretations, is the only one to get something close to the savage, complex spirit of the book onto the screen. (Brogan Morris)
The Skinny gives 4 stars to Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album:
So yes, it “accompanies” the film. It’s also the best part of it; a correction: Brontë’s gothica as something that clings and stains. And Charli, thoughtfully and tastefully, suffusing that stain into her continued ascendancy. (Rhys Morgan)
Perhaps, though, that is the point: Charli intentionally leaves the listener yearning for something they cannot quite name and reflecting the tortured longing that defines the “Wuthering Heights” film.
The production, lyricism and instrumentation across the album are magnificent. Charli stepped out of “BRAT” with the same messy confidence that defined the era and into a world of storytelling and anecdotal realism. The project is harsh but gentle, authentic but exploratory — and with “Wuthering Heights,” Charli has never been more herself. (Mia Hamon)
All great soundtracks can extract themselves from the context of the film. Even without seeing Wuthering Heights, you get a feeling Charli XCX is writing for the film, rather than adapting the Emily Bronte classic to the studio independent of Fennell’s vision. Sometimes a bit of a creative clash fuels a stronger fire, and there are moments of this on Wuthering Heights. You can predict where Wuthering Heights is headed, beat for beat. Rising string sections, a few club beats to remind listeners where they may know the name Charli XCX from, and ultimately a collection of songs which hardly scream period piece. Such is the point. Subversion of authorial intent is the way forward for adaptations now, a counter to predictability which has, ironically, become predictable in of itself. For those who did not exhaust themselves on Brat, then Wuthering Heights may have a few sparks of quality. (Ewan Gleadow)
Everything about Charli’s “Wuthering Heights” contradicts itself. It’s classical and avant-garde, a euphoric release but also tautly restrained. Yet in those idiosyncrasies lies an innate truth towards the nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, where their dichotomies are what makes them the most complex. By embracing innate messiness rather than smoothing it out, Charli’s concept album reaffirms her bold instinct of adapting a widely known love story into something unmistakably, electrifyingly, her own. (Amelia Knust)
Although it may seem like a drastic departure, in this light, “Wuthering Heights” might be a homecoming for Charli, who’s only ever comfortable in change. Whether the light or darkness will carry into her next venture can’t be said. Knowing Charli, she’ll create new matter entirely. (Allison Treanor)
“Wuthering Heights” by Charli xcx is a SparkNotes version of Brontë’s novel: Casual listeners have an opportunity to catch the “vibe” of the novel without actually reading some 400 pages. As a concept album, “Wuthering Heights” is masterful. Charli xcx brings what she does best — heavy production and intense autotune — to work alongside moody strings and hedonistic themes. With this new album Charli xcx brilliantly escaped the trap of trying to recreate her success in “BRAT,” instead pivoting to showcase her storytelling skills and creative fluidity. (Alyssia Ouhocine)
If this had been released as a standalone project, it would have been hailed as a neat, sonically cohesive effort. Singles like “Altars” already have great production and excellent lyrics, and connecting them to the film’s passion only serves to highlight their brilliance and make for an even better listening experience. Grounding the album in a world, like the film “Wuthering Heights,” strengthens it. (Francis Rienzo)
By trading strobe-lit arenas for wild and windy moors, the singer meets the challenge of transplanting her music into a new landscape. Wuthering Heights is both a reinvention and familiar offering from the singer: underlining her adventurousness as a musician and the strengths (and limits) of her songwriting. (Harry Tafoya)
0 comments:
Post a Comment