US Edition‘Wuthering Heights’ review: A messy, occasionally irresistible adaptation
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation foregrounds erotic death and forbidden desire, reshaping Brontë’s novel with provocative scenes and a focus on abject, tumultuous passion between Cathy and Heathcliff.
- Emerald Fennell opens her adaptation with a public hanging whose groans read as an erotic spectacle, shocking Charlotte Mellington's young Catherine into ecstatic frenzy and signaling her motif entwining sex and death.
- Drawing from Brontë's novel, Emerald Fennell abridges and elaborates the 1847 text to foreground forbidden desire, continuing themes from Promising Young Woman and Saltburn.
- Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie deliver intense chemistry, with Elordi selling Heathcliff's anguish while Fennell punctuates their bond using vivid sensual tableaux like snail trails and a corset lift.
- Reviewers argue that Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights overpromises on provocation and feels emotionally incoherent despite its visually daring style.
- This reinterpretation positions Emerald Fennell's film as almost fan-fictional, inserting daringly kinky sex that will divide audiences, nearly 179 years after Emily Brontë's novel first provoked critics.
11 Articles
11 Articles
Wuthering Heights is a new adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. It's not the first adaptation, however. Viewers may recall, for example, William Wyler's 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, or Peter Kosminsky's 1992 film with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. This time, the new version is directed by British actress and director Emerald Fennell.
Review: Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' is a bold but shallow take on Brontë's classic
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Catherine and Heathcliff in the new adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” Filmmaker Emerald Fennell has said she wanted to make a film that captured how she felt when she read it at 14. Emily Brontë’s…
‘Wuthering Heights’ review: A messy, occasionally irresistible adaptation
Emerald Fennell’s turgid yet weirdly enjoyable “Wuthering Heights” is basically fan fiction; it takes Emily Brontë’s well-known setting and characters and does, well, something else with them. If you read Brontë’s novel and thought hmm, this is pretty good but…
Wuthering Heights review: This radical revamp from Emerald Fennell will almost certainly provoke pearl-clutching
★★★★☆Wuthering Heights is in cinemas from 13 February. Add it to your watchlistEmily Brontë’s gothic romance gets a radical revamp in this sizzling, amusing and stormy new screen adaptation from Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell, who bagged an Original Screenplay Oscar for her attention-grabbing 2020 debut Promising Young Woman.Casting Hollywood’s hottest properties, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, as her leads, writer/director Fennell presents us with…
Movie review: Fennell's messy 'Wuthering Heights' is a playful, unsatisfying adaptation
With three films under her belt, the auteurist obsessions of English writer/director Emerald Fennell are becoming obvious, even though she’s not particularly subtle about her cinematic proclivities. In fact, her latest film, an “adaptation” of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” (the title is stylized with quotes as an ironic nod to the liberties Fennell takes with the text), opens with a direct acknowledgment of her own tendency to ero
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