“‘Wuthering Heights’” is Emerald Fennell’s third feature film, which was released on February 13th. It is the sixth feature film adaptation of the book, “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. 

I went to see “Wuthering Heights” and sat in a reasonably full theater for a 1:00 PM showing. “‘Wuthering Heights’” follows the ups and downs of Catherine (Robbie) and Heathcliff’s (Elordi) controversial relationship as love, lust, pain and beauty get entangled into something monstrous and obsessive. They go from friends to lovers to enemies to everything in between as they continually cheat and betray each other, themselves, and the people around them. “‘Wuthering Heights’” chooses the route of sexuality to tell the story. Specifically deviant sexuality and the relationship between pain, love and lust. Other adaptations have taken different routes, like using race as a lens to tell the story. The target audience for this movie, like other Emerald Fennell movies, is younger than the movie’s rating. This is often because of their attractive stars, steamy and controversial scenes and clip-able moments that do numbers across social media. Initially, this was just a side-effect of her unique style of filmmaking. However, it’s hard not to think that she is actively seeking this as her goal instead of focusing on creating a good movie. “Wuthering Heights” is an appeal to the fanboys and fangirls of the two main actors and offers little intrigue or story to string its gratuitous sex scenes together. Now, I think that when sex is used in the service of the story, it can be very powerful. I even thought that Fennell’s previous two movies had good uses of sex. It was used in “Promising Young Woman” (her first and best movie) as a weapon of revenge for its protagonist and used in “Saltburn” to demonstrate obsession pushed to its most lustful and extreme form. However, in “Wuthering Heights,” it becomes tedious, repetitive and doesn’t move the story forward at all. We watch 20-minute-long sequences of sex just for the sake of sex. The movie takes huge year-long leaps in time but still manages to be painfully slow, boring and uninteresting. The two main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, are totally unlikable and 100% in the wrong, making the “will-they-won’t-they” (which is dragged on painfully long in the movie) unengaging and boring. 

This is without even mentioning the decision to race swap Heathcliffe to being a white man, but choosing to race swap the two bad guys to people of color. In the original book, Heathcliff is described as having “a darker complexion” and having features that are typically attributed to people of South Asian or Spanish descent. The Heathcliff in the book experiences racism, and as I said before, there have been adaptations before this one that chose to look at the whole story through the race angle. However, Fennell’s decision to race-swap Heathcliff to a white man (Elordi) was controversial but was defended by Fennell when she told The Hollywood Reporter, “You can only ever make the movie that you imagined yourself when you read it.” Her looseness in the adaptation because of her faithfulness to her “imagining” of the book is admittedly very interesting, and explains the quotation marks around the title and the surreal imagery in the film. 

Story, writing, editing, pace and performance all fall at the wayside of making something that looks aesthetic. “‘Wuthering Heights’” lacked all of those attributes, as well as any amount of charm or fun, which is required in a movie that can only be enjoyed as camp. However, “‘Wuthering Heights’” takes itself too seriously to even do that, and therefore becomes overly self-indulgent when it really doesn’t deserve to be. However, “‘Wuthering Heights’” thinks it’s the most captivating, serious and important movie ever made. There’s an air of pretentiousness here that started with “Saltburn” but was really apparent here. Emerald Fennell thinks she’s the best, and this overconfidence bleeds through into the movie in the form of obnoxiousness. To me, this movie didn’t get interesting until the very last twenty minutes of the movie, which was when I felt the first emotion I had felt in nearly two hours. The last twenty minutes are what the whole movie was building to, and it does work! Regardless, it doesn’t justify slogging through the rest of the movie. This could have been so much shorter, but instead the decision was made to linger on each plot point (no matter how important) for at least 15 minutes. Moping? 15 minutes of that. Sex? 15 minutes of that. Yearning? 15 minutes of that. You can imagine my confusion when the screen cut to black and the lights in the theater came up, and I turned around to see 10 people crying. I just don’t understand feeling anything at all while watching this movie—it even falls short of feeling romantic during the scenes that so clearly want you to feel that way. “‘Wuthering Heights’” is pretty but dull, empty and unsexy. This movie works better on a Pinterest board.