Lush or lame? Critics split on ‘saucy’ Wuthering Heights
Two kids from Queensland star in this year’s most divisive film, noted as being “not your Penguin Classics school-curriculum edition”.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes
It’s been dubbed the year’s most divisive film, but if there’s one thing critics agree on it’s that this Wuthering Heights is not a movie your high-school English teacher would have been happy to show in the classroom.
“Unabashedly horny”, “provocative”, “pervy”, “swoonily romantic”, “audacious” and “graphically overt” are just some of the adjectives being employed to describe British director Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Bronte’s classic 19th-century novel.
And that’s before we even get to the “orgasmic gasping” and “saucy slap of BDSM”.
Wuthering Heights opens in cinemas across the globe this week but has been the subject of intense debate since it was first announced – not least because of the casting of Australians Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as ill-fated lovers Cathy and Heathcliff.
Controversy – and anticipation – grew with the release of the first trailer for the film, which teased at a highly erotic adaptation by Fennell, known for her Oscar-winning revenge drama Promising Young Woman and salacious class satire Saltburn.
Now, the first reviews confirm that the sexual desire is indeed much more explicit in this story than in Bronte’s original novel.
“It’s Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter’s critic, who opened his review by describing a scene in which Robbie’s Cathy masturbates on a rock on the West Yorkshire moors.
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“This is not your Penguin Classics school curriculum edition.”
Indeed not.
Variety, which notes that previous adaptations (including the G-rated 1970 film starring Timothy Dalton) have been somewhat tame by comparison, suggests Fennell has seized on a passionate undercurrent in Bronte’s original story, including mind games that see power shift between the two leads.
“To situate it in terms of Emily Bronte’s sister Charlotte, Fennell’s approach feels more Wide Sargasso Sea than Jane Eyre: sophisticated fan fiction that revels in heaving bosoms, damp flesh and kinky sex (just not between Catherine and Heathcliff).”
The film’s producers have used inverted commas around the title of Wuthering Heights to emphasise that it is Fennell’s “interpretation” of the book, the second half of which is largely ditched in this screen version.
Nonetheless, Cathy and Heathcliff are said to be clearly recognisable as Bronte’s characters, whose lives become intwined after Cathy’s father (played by Doc Martin’s Martin Clunes) brings home a young orphan (later named Heathcliff) as a kind of step-brother for his daughter.
One of the early complaints by Bronte fans was the fact that at 35 and 28, respectively, Robbie and Elordi were much older than the teenage pair in the novel. Many critics, however, seem unfazed by the age difference.
“Robbie’s performance is magnificent, making Cathy wild and selfish but with a conscience, and an innocence beneath her sense of entitlement,” declares the BBC in a four-star review that describes Wuthering Heights as “utterly absorbing”.
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Its adds: “Elordi embodies Heathcliff’s dashing, bad-boy energy, even when stuck with a stringy-haired wig.”
The Hollywood Reporter agreed that the “chemistry sizzles” between the two leads, but was not alone in suggesting that the film “largely whitewashes the underlying toxicity” (involving race, class and colonialism) that makes their relationship unsettling.
In a scathing two-star review for The Guardian, film critic Peter Bradshaw went further, saying the adaptation “very feebly erases the issue of Heathcliff’s dark skin”.
Bradshaw accused Fennell of reinventing Bronte’s tale “as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM”.
“It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion,” he wrote.
The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey was even more harsh in her one-star review, claiming the film “uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable”.
“Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work,” Loughrey wrote.
Also not a fan – but for different reasons – was Vulture critic Tomris Laffly, who declared that while many people might think this Wuthering Heights was too much, she felt it was “not enough”.
An avowed Fennell fan, Laffly described it as a “curiously timid” film that “keeps teasing a spirited, emotionally arousing movie that never quite arrives”.
“I think we can all agree that Elordi and Robbie are two of the most gorgeous screen stars working today. I melt just looking at them. And so how the sex scenes between them look so lifeless… it’s beyond me. I didn’t even ask for much from this movie. Just a little life & sweat.”
While the film is set in the Victorian period, there are modern flourishes in the cinematography, production design, costumes and score, which includes original songs by British singer Charli XCX.
Robbie’s seemingly bottomless wardrobe of showstopping gowns on the Wuthering Heights promotional tour have been said to be inspired by the movie’s gothic-chic aesthetic, and the costumes in the film – especially Cathy’s red-hued gowns – have prompted similar plaudits.
“An exquisite spectacle of craftsmanship that left me salivating over the costumes, cinematography and production design,” wrote Variety’s Jazz Tangcay on X, while the BBC declared they were “fit for an Oscar red carpet”.
The Wuthering Heights reviews are already coming in on movie website Rotten Tomatoes – by Tuesday afternoon, the film was scoring just over 70 per cent based on 68 reviews.
Wuthering Heights opens in Australian cinemas on February 12
