Wuthering Heights

GoMovieReviews Rating: ★★★1/2

Rated: M

Directed by: Emerald Fennell

Written by: Emerald Fennell

Inspired by the Novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) Written by: Emily Brontë

Produced by: Emerald Fennell, Margot Robbie, Josey McNamara

Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, and Ewan Mitchell.

‘Do you love him?’

It’s an ominous beginning to, Wuthering Heights, the film set in the times when a hanging was an event to be celebrated and then consummated because of the rush of desire in the face of death: it’s a picture of happy people living in a harsh reality.  A perspective that writer and director, Emerald Fennell brings to her films: that discord like the edging of lace over a corset pulled too tight so the wearer is one pull away from losing her breath.

Living with her father (Martin Clunes), young Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) is doted upon yet forced to tolerate her father’s drunken moods.

Catherine is precocious, best friends with her companion Nelly Dean (Vy Nguyen) and indulged by her father because she loves him in spite of his dislike of women’s emotions.  So he brings home a young boy (Owen Cooper) being kicked by a man in the street to show he’s the, ‘kindest man in the world’.

‘He can be your pet,’ he tells Catherine.

‘I shall name him, Heathcliff,’ Catherine says.  Heathcliffe being the name of her dead brother.

They become inseparable.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ Heathcliffe tells Catherine.

The film leans into Catherine’s bratfulness; even grown, Catherine (Margot Robbie) still has her childish obsessions.  They grow up together, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) obviously in love with Catherine as he ledges her face with his hands like a cap to shield her face from the rain.  It’s adorable.  But it took me a while to warm up to the romance.

The raw energy is what I liked about the film but also what held me back from liking the characters.

Catherine and Heathcliff apart are monstrous, petulant and selfish.

It’s a story about what brings them together, the love that holds them together and the circumstances that keep them apart.  And the consequences.

Catherine and Heathcliff are so absorbed in each other they fail to see or feel anything else. It’s a film of obsession that keeps building.

Time is shown by wounds healed into scars and heady montages of embrace and tongues licking walls and skin so it’s sultry and stylised like a Mills and Boon novel set with a dark undertone of strange doll houses and wallpaper made to resemble skin, including the freckle of Catherine’s cheek.  Even the tapestry is riddled with phallic symbols hinting at a not-so-subtle desire bubbling to the surface.  It’s a sultry film.  Yet it‘s the details that finally drew me in.  Then the story because although there’s the romance novel costume and pirate outfit of the handsome Heathcliff, the characters are rounded out – Catherine can be nasty but she genuinely loves Heathcliff in spite of the circumstances.  She wants to look after him, then loves him so much she wants to hurt him.

Wuthering Heights is not a usual romance or tragedy, it just ends up that way, with all the dark humour and tilted world perspective I’ve come to expect from Emerald Fennell.

I can’t say l loved the film but it did move me because the characters had both flaws and beauty on display.  And that’s something l can appreciate: the risk in the raw telling.