The Tamesis
For the past year and a half, the world has been hotly discussing and debating Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights— and now, after an endless stream of premieres, interviews and method tweaks, the film is finally getting a theatrical release. After all, how could it possibly live up to the deafening hype? But happily, it does – whatever you think of this big, bold, gorgeous, controversial melodrama, it’s at least as ambitious and divisive as the campaign that preceded it.
The film opens with rapid breathing that sounds like masturbation but is actually suffocation – young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) and her only older housekeeper Nellie (Ve Nguyen) watch a man gasping for air at a public hanging. The chaos is filled with bodily fluids, a jeering crowd, and applauding demonic Punch and Judy puppets, giving the whole scene the feel of a crazy fairy tale. This sequence shocked many viewers at the film’s earliest test screenings, and it’s the perfect litmus test for everything that follows – love it, like me, and you’ll have a lot of fun with it for the next two hours or so; hate it, like many people at the screening I attended (a few dropped out), and it can be a difficult seat to sit in.
It’s clear from this opening that fans of Emily Brontë’s beloved novel would be wise to leave their expectations at the door – to be generous, this wild take on the classic is a very loose adaptation of its source material. Its structure has been altered, key characters have been significantly altered or disappeared entirely, and countless liberties have been taken with the central relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. (Fennell was open to the changes, saying the film was based on her memories of reading the book as a teenager and was not strictly faithful.) But if you can get beyond that, it’s quite a journey.
After this dizzying scene, Cathy and Nelly jump home across a river of blood to Wuthering Heights, their ominous, coal-stained, otherworldly abode, and soon encounter Heathcliff (pubertyOwen Cooper, a young boy brought home by Cathy’s alcoholic and ill-tempered father (Martin Clunes). Heathcliff drives a wedge between the two girls, and Cathy becomes obsessed with her new playmate. They grow up almost like siblings and before you know it, they become Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
