Wuthering Heights review: Sensual film will give Emily Brontë purists a fit of the vapours
Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw
★★★☆☆
‘Peace with you is worse than war,’ snarls Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) at Cathy (Margot Robbie) in Emerald Fennell’s (15A), in which Emily Brontë’s gothic tale of amour fou on the Yorkshire Moors is given a baroque makeover.
Soulmates ever since the foundling child Heathcliff was dragged back to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) to become Cathy’s ‘pet’, the insular pair grow up locked into a mutually destructive obsession, the depth of which is only fully revealed when Cathy marries the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).
Those quotation marks around the title are there to remind us that this is Emerald Fennell’s personal take on and a singular vision it is too: eschewing the supernatural elements of the original story, and heightening its latent eroticism with sado-masochistic flourishes and an elegantly refined emotional cruelty, this is an earthy and sensually fleshy that will likely give Emily Brontë purists a fit of the vapours.
If you’re happy to take it all with a pinch of salt (Cathy’s frocks may be anachronistic in terms of 18th century fashion, for example, but they’re also eye-poppingly gorgeous), then you’ll likely enjoy this immensely.
Margot Robbie gives a blackly comic performance as the bratty and self-absorbed ‘wretched shrew’ Cathy, Jacob Elordi delivers handsomely in the role of the scowling, brooding brute, and the backdrop of the bleak and windswept moor is beautifully captured by cinematographer Linus Sandgren.
All of which combines to deliver an epic in a minor key, in which each scene is more extravagantly dramatic than the last; the longer it goes on, however, the more the suspicion grows that the extravagance – the frou-frou frocks, Cathy’s dazzling bling, an excessively mannered fever-dream of inevitable doom unfurling – matters more than the characters themselves.
- Theatrical release
