“Wuthering Heights”: Emerald Fennell reimagines Brontë’s classic as a lurid teenage dream

Dolls feature prominently in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. The film’s brash, bacchanalian opening scene – featuring a hanging, a hand-job and a girthy post-mortem erection – is presided over by a gleeful Punch and Judy, framed between scarlet curtains. Moments later young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), who we first see revelling at the sight of a man’s execution, weeps upon learning of his crime, as her companion Nelly uses a pair of marionettes to illustrate the mechanics of rape. On first meeting the orphaned boy her father has brought home, Cathy asks if she can “dress him up”. As an adult, Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) wedding gift from her husband’s ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), is a fabric figurine with hair taken from Cathy’s own gilded head, kept within a scale model of her magnificent marital home. In due course Isabella will furiously rip her little Cathy to pieces.

In Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, Fennell has found her own beautiful pair of real-life mannequins to dress up and act out her fantasy of Emily Brontë’s story about the intense, ambivalent bond between broody foundling Heathcliff (played here by a show-stealing Owen Cooper as a child and Elordi as an adult) and headstrong Catherine Earnshaw. Fennell has been frank about the liberties she’s taken with her source material, describing the film as an expression of her 14-year-old self’s first experience of the book. So, gone is the second complicated half of the text, along with about half of the characters. Gone, too, the internal obstacles that run through the central relationship, the hatred, resentment, racial and class tensions displaced on to Nelly, the inscrutable lady’s companion, played by Hong Chau.

In their place is a quivering version of tragic romance borne of misapprehensions and missed connections, all yearning and foreplay. Here, sex is as repulsive as it is alluring: a blurry, frightening thing. More than once I was reminded of the adolescent heroine of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (adapted for screen by Joe Wright in 2007), who in her confusion and jealousy mistakes passion for violence. If this film’s sex scenes are disappointingly tame – bodies banished to the offscreen space in favour of close-ups of slurpy, sloppy kissing – it’s because this is a virgin’s version of what the carnal act looks like.

Indeed, in typical teenage fashion, the staging of romance is as important, if not more so, as the physical act. Fennell has assembled a tremendous production team to bring her lurid teenage dream to life, crafting a colour-saturated, baroque spectacle. Barbie (2023) costume designer Jaqueline Durran dresses Margot Robbie like a little loo-roll doll: her tiny, tightly bound torso protruding from hyperbolically swishy skirts made of latex and lace, chiffon and silk. Art director Caroline Barclay crafts the film’s title from ropes of braided hair, a nod towards the mourning jewellery worn at the time (a replica of Charlotte Brontë’s bracelet, made from the dead Emily and Anne’s hair, has been worn by Robbie on the film’s press tour). Cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land, Babylon), imbues the sweeping, sodden landscapes with a sense of the epic, at one point recreating a shot from Gone with the Wind.

Most impressive of all are Charlotte Diryckx’s sets, which include a chessboard-tiled room over which two enormous towers of green gin bottles loom. Then there’s the thuddingly literal but nonetheless stunning interpretation of the Georgian ‘skin-room’, a nickname for the type of cloistered wooden bed closet that features in the opening sections of Brontë’s novel, here rendered as a fleshy wallpaper made from scans of Robbie’s skin. Towards the film’s end we enter this wan space only to find it tattooed with dark blots that gradually resolve as leeches, sliding down the wall and onto Cathy’s body.

There’s no doubting Fennell has an eye for an arresting image. And while her love for gratuitous gore may be somewhat in abeyance here, her gift for skewering the privileged upper classes is deliciously evident in supporting performances by Alison Oliver, as a seething rival for Heathcliff’s affections, and Martin Clunes as Cathy’s capricious old soak of a father. Heathcliff can hardly be left on the streets, Mr Earnshaw snootily proclaims, after all “This is not Liverpool” (leaving one to wonder what exactly Fennell has against the north-west, given its ungenerous treatment in her previous film). In the early scenes even Robbie has her moments of levity, channelling Rosamund Pike turn from Saltburn (2023) as she snobbishly dismisses Heathcliff’s fantasies of domestic harmony.

It’s a shame that these tongue-in-cheek moments all but disappear in the film’s second half, to be replaced by a rather repetitive series of comings together and fallings apart that will only end with the film itself. If there’s one thing “Wuthering Heights” makes clear, it’s that anticipation is half the pleasure.

► “Wuthering Heights” is in UK cinemas now.