Strap yourself in. You will either love this or hate it. Brontë purists beware, but BookTok will go crazy for it. Me? Be still, my churning 14-year-old heart. After the clit-tease of a muscular marketing campaign we now get the actual product, ripe for Valentine’s Day. A film of such gleeful power it may well liquify your innards just watching it.I inhaled this latest iteration of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel not with my heart (as with the 1939 Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version,) nor with my head (the dour, overly earnest 2011 one), but with my groin. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s fresh interpretation has electrified the franchise. I suspect it’s going to be huge, drawing in the fangirling young women who made Barbie, Six the Musical, Titanic and Taylor Swift such muscular successes. (...)We see something far kinkier, yet true to the essence of the book. It’s all licking, fingering and flayed emotion, everything imagined and implied. And there we have the essence of women-directed sex, the new sexuality for the screen. Sex through the female gaze. What women actually want. Playful and tender. Foreplay and suggestion, rather than thrust. (...)There’s no cautiousness to this, just as there wasn’t to the original novel. How can women filmmakers smash through the tight little bro club that bestows platforming and pay cheques upon certain clubby projects? With daring audacity, with bolshie irreverence. And here we have it. The aim: to be fearless. Brontë was. Fennell is. (Nikki Gemmell)
Not so Fennell, whose wild and deliciously vicious "Wuthering Heights" (the pretension of those quotation marks already spawning their own assembly line of snoozing derision) is here this Valentine's Day to rattle our tender parts with bone-shivering venom dressed up in Tom Petty music-video drag. This is a movie that knows the best love stories are all blood-lettings in minute (but sexy!) detail, and delivers just that. A deluge of melodrama, its bodice soaked through thick and mean, this movie leaves a heap of gorgeous corpses in its wake--ours included. I wouldn't have it any other way. (...)
Fennell's said she set out to make the version of Wuthering Heights that she felt and remembered feeling as a teenager reading the book, but divorced from page-and-number specificities. And her "Wuthering Heights" is the ecstatic truth of it. Bigger, bolder, red flesh in a hand-shaped welt over the heart, (Jason Adams)
There’s not an inch of flesh in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights that isn’t flushed with arousal and glistening with a patina of trickling sweat. Not a bosom to be seen that isn’t straining to escape from the bondage of its corset. Not a shred of shirt fabric that isn’t rain-drenched and clinging to gym-chiselled musculature. To the surprise of precisely nobody, Fennell has had her wicked way with Emily Brontë’s cherished novel. This is less a respectful literary adaptation than a come-hither invitation to crawl down the cinema aisle on all fours and lick the screen. I enjoyed it immensely. (...)Divested of glitter and sequins, of Cathy’s fabulous frocks and of the scorching stolen clinches, the film’s final act feels underpowered and the drama starts to drag. It is a shame, given how robustly red-blooded and raunchy this telling is at the beginning – an all-consuming passion that burns fast before it’s extinguished. (Wendy Ide)
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are electric in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. A dark, sultry, and devastating take on a classic. (...)Visually, the film is a triumph. The production design, the costumes, and the sweeping, moody sets are absolutely gorgeous – every single shot is a literal work of art. I’m not exaggerating when I say I would hang almost any frame of this movie on my wall as a poster (yes, even the slightly dirty ones). (...)Emerald Fennell has proven once again that she is a master of tone. She takes the Gothic genre and turns it into something modern, sexy, and devastating. If you’re looking for a polite, tea-sipping period drama, this isn’t it. But if you want a film that haunts you long after the credits roll, Wuthering Heights has you covered. (Tessa Smith)
This movie absolutely tormented me, and I loved it for that; as I rooted for terrible, toxic, abusive monsters to be together because of the belief that Fennell instills in you about the smallest fraction of pure love inherently embedded deep within their destructive relationship. She has crafted a gorgeous, passionate, provocative (and incredibly horny) film, successfully exploring beauty and darkness that comes with every aspect of love and obsession. And thanks to a dynamic cast, including insane chemistry between Robbie and Elordi, as well as a scene stealing Alison Oliver, she genuinely has another strong entry into her already fantastic filmography. It will absolutely not be for everyone, and I anticipate it being highly divisive. Yet at the end of the day, Wuthering Heights drove me mad with its beauty and unflinching honesty, and I frankly wouldn’t have it any other way. (Mike Manalo)
Emerald Fennell has written and directed a fascinating retelling of Wuthering Heights that makes you question if anyone is truly good at heart. I still maintain that in order to have a bigger impact in the story’s portrayal of Heathcliff, one could have incorporated his novel-based description of being dark-skinned in a way that gives visual life to the social, economic, and political views of the time period. While I did miss that from the film, there’s no doubt that Fennell’s reimagining of this Gothic tale will linger with you as it wuthers long after the credits roll. (Nikita Francois)
While measuring the film’s potential for success has little to do with what I’m taking away quality-wise, it’s easy to see just how well this movie can play for an audience that may not be exactly dying for more Brontë on the screen. It comes down to the choices Fennell effectively handles in her interpretation of the material. That’s not to say a straightforward take on Wuthering Heights is impossible to pull off nowadays. Still, I’m happy to laud a director whose ambitions allow for a version of this story that makes room for provocative visuals, a direct approach to sexuality, and characters who visibly lean into their desires. And this is all while accompanied by extreme cinematic choices and music to match from a modern artist. For a film designed to be tantalizing in its own way, I was happy to meet it where it lies. (Aaron Neuwirth)
As soon as this project was announced, it was easy to assume that Fennell would show as much reverence for the classic text as she showed for the sanctity of a man’s grave in Saltburn. Except she defies that assumption by making sure that although “Wuthering Heights” remains a deliciously horny film, it does summon a certain degree of pure romance, especially in the few moments when its leads are able to see past their misunderstandings and actually connect. It’s a movie about how ugly people can be to each other, but also about the beauty they’re capable of — a message that, like the original text itself, remains timeless. (Liz Shannon Miller)
As someone who has griped for months over this movie, I was surprised that I walked away from "Wuthering Heights" liking it as much as I did. The outrageous beauty and opulence of the movie props up a lot, as do Robbie and Elordi. This feels like a Wuthering Heights for our current era. One that is both contemporary yet hearkening back to a classic filmmaking style. The soul of the novel is there and "Wuthering Heights" stands on its own as yet another great adaptation of Brontë's novel. (Kristen Lopez)
Emerald Fennell’s unfaithful adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel reignites the epic romance genre with an all-consuming love story and a pulsating Charli XCX soundtrack. (...) What remains constant throughout “Wuthering Heights” is the intense presence of the color red, a thematic choice to continuously depict the impassioned and fiery romance between the ill-fated characters. (Tessa Lapradez)
I feel like Fennell works well with Elordi, especially as a romantic focus, maybe a muse of sorts. This is a film I could see watching again, and I do think it connects some things that a film like Materialists tried to talk about but ended up being less honest about. I believe “Wuthering Heights” works well with this new tension in our society, pushing conservative ideas of relationships versus what people actually want and how they actually live. (Julian Lytle)As a designer, I applaud the craft that went into this film’s aesthetics. But pretty is NOT enough. “Wuthering Heights” is frequently so bombastic the emotion is muted. That’s a shame because these actors are giving ovation-worthy performances. And when it comes to dialogue, Fennell’s script pours out the good stuff like champagne—it sparkles, it’s clever, and it’s dangerous. That makes the flawed storytelling that much more perplexing. (Sherin Nicole)
The bad ones
Had the film been somehow absent of race (if such a thing is even possible), then the idea of yet another white Heathcliff may have been just another cumbersome inevitability. However, its casting and rewriting gestures constantly towards racial identity as a central tenet of various characters. (...)In Wuthering Heights, gestures of yearning and obsession are only rendered with a steady artistic hand if deemed worthy by way of authorship—which, in this case, aligns unfortunately with the outdated traditions of Hollywood, and the inevitability of conventionally attractive white leads being the only deserving locus of serious cinema. Atop the numerous faults of this approach (primarily, as matter of unsavory optics), it speaks to an incompleteness within Fennell’s adaptation, whether by intent or inability, to imbue the story with a more multifaceted humanity that would have made its drama between Catherine and Heathcliff more difficult or more rigorous. Instead, what we’re left with is a series of vast, expressionistic backdrops that never feel grounded in the agony or ecstasy theoretically driving the story, as its beautiful leads struggle against a world that seldom constrains them with a shred of vigor or vehemence, eliciting little more than a shrug.For all its fiery flourishes, the result is dull as a doorknob, and just as cold. (Siddhant Adhaka)
It is possible to make a bad adaptation that is still interesting and rewarding in its own way. By contrast, it is something else entirely to make a bad adaptation that is also dull as dishwater. That is what writer, director, and producer Emerald Fennell has accomplished.It is not the first bad adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel, and it won't be the last. It can't even claim the title of worst adaptation because it is so uninteresting that it doesn't deserve such credit. (...)So it's a bad adaptation. It either misunderstands Brontë's original prose or refuses to engage with it. That is the prerogative of every filmmaker. But how does it stand on its own as a film?Not well, to be honest. Your enjoyment will entirely depend on how much you're willing to engage with Fennell's empty provocations. For anyone who has seen an indie film or two, nothing here will shock or titillate. (...)For its credit, Wuthering Heights occasionally impresses with beautiful vistas and a perfectly fine score from Charli xcx. Even if Fennell's vision is somewhere between Tim Burton and an Evanescence music video. A more interesting filmmaker would make a meal of the disparate elements. Here, they just dangle as trophies collected in an expensive vanity case. (...)In fact, if you want to see something that's truly outrageous, but also brave and interesting, watch Ken Russell's incendiary study about control and repressed sexuality: The Devils. It has nothing to do with Wuthering Heights as a story, but, then again, neither does this. (Joonatan Itkonen)
The filmmaker’s adaptation, sorry, “reimagining” – hence the title's use of, and insistence on referring to it with, its quotations – of Emily Brontë’s classic romance deconstructing love in conflict of inner desire under class and racial disparity arrives as if it were meant to come out around the 2010s. Remember when studios were going for the Hot Topic/Twilight crowd with Red Riding Hood, Beastly, Beautiful Creatures, etc.? Around that same time, another piece of Twilight-influenced media, Fifty Shades of Grey, dropped, and female-gaze smut made a resurgence in the mainstream. (...)
Despite its breathtaking production and art direction – enough to make cottagecore-obsessed Tumblr users and Pinterest board makers go mad – Fennell's “Wuthering Heights” is a completely hollow misinterpretation of the source. It’s too dull, tame, and frustrating in her substance enough to make Emily Brontë roll in her grave. (Rendy Jones)
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