“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

[Altair]

I have to say it reminds me of Powell and Pressburger’s Gone to Earth, in its saturated colors and over the top emotions. I’m intrigued.

[Lowry_Sam]

Looks like 50 Shades Of Bronte to me.

[Mr Sausage]

Trailer. "Inspired by the greatest love story of all time." I think I'm gonna barf.

Given the state of the discourse around relationships these days, I'm pretty tickled they're offering up the obsessive, morbid, codependent, thoroughly unhealthy relationship of the novel as the world's greatest love story!

[Michael Kerpan]

I thought I disliked Rivette's adaptation initially. Then I read the book and decided Rivette's film seemed like quite an improvement over the original (ditto for the Bunuel adaptation). I really dislike the book a lot -- totally independent to my reaction to the contempt the Bronte sisters seem to have had for their much greater predecessor Jane Austen.

[Mr Sausage]

A thunderous bore. A movie for people who like their themes and character points double underlined and then triple underlined. A movie that starts off shouting in your ear and never stops for over two hours. I thought this might be bad; I was unprepared for a trainwreck this extensive.

The source of the film's many problems is that filmmakers neither trusted themselves nor their material. This shows at times as a contemptuousness and condescension towards the material, at others a need to hide the material under layers of artifice to disguise its insufficiency. The artifice is what stands out immediately, and it's so loud and ludicrous, emphasizing and then recapitulating the same points, that it has the effect of bathos. Things at the extremes often resemble their opposites, and the film, by repeated overemphasis, makes even its grandest moments seem silly, and its characters petty even in their passions.

Let's start with the artifice: the film opens with a black screen and what sounds like the heavy breathing of sexual arousal, only for the picture to cut in, showing us we're actually hearing the last gasps of a man choking to death on the gallows. He sports a massive, comically proportioned erection that, just as the man dies, ejaculates in a closeup. This whole long scene is intercut with closeups of young Cathy's rapturous fascination, closeups of a marionette show (announcing the artifice theme), and various coarse reactions from the crowd. As an announcement of the movie's themes, there's nowhere left to go. Everything has been said, in double underline. The rest is recapitulation. The style grows more hysterical and uncontrolled from there. The movie is fixated on ugly sexuality--anything slimy or mucousy, anything paraphilic, anything redolent of kink or sado-masochism (which the movie renders ugly; I am not expressing my own sentiment towards the kink community). People are forever shoving their hands into slime or slop: broken eggs, wet dough, a fish in gelatin that Cathy slowly fingers. Cathy's first two sexual experiences are watching a dying man ejaculate, and watching the hired help have a whip-and-bondage session in the barn. She's caught masturbating on the moors by Heathcliffe not long after having a charged, erotic encounter with him next to a butchered pig carcass that covers her hem in blood. The movie is always trying to disgust you with its characters' sexuality (an odd choice for "the world's greatest love story", as the tagline has it), but is fascinated enough with the grossness to want to keep shoving our faces in it. Never at any point is this sexy. Indeed the repulsion seems the point. Why repulse the audience like this? I have a theory which I'll get to.

For the movie's significant locations, Wuthering Heights is a stone dungeon awash with slime and mud; Thrushcross Grange is a dollhouse (containing dollhouses) meant to outdo Wes Anderson. They scream their own fakery. Whenever there is an emotional or thematic point to be made, the movie will have the characters say it, and then will have the characters pose in a hyper-stylized tableau to emphasize it, then will raise the volume on the score whose lyrics will again underline it. This is not an exaggeration but a feeble attempt to communicate the sheer level of insistence all through this movie. Bronte's novel seems to take place in its own weird universe, something heightened and like a fairy tale. It's exaggerated, but has a persuasive reality. Fennell's movie not only seems to take place in no identifiable reality, but is at pains to make its world seem as fake and unpersuasive as possible. This is a problem since the movie also wants to make real-world points about wealth disparity and female victimization under the patriachy, something that doesn't work while you're also making your movie's social setting seem totally fake. If I didn't know any better I'd say the movie wanted to keep its audience at arm's length, aware at all times that what we're watching is not real.

Then there's the condescension. The filmmakers seem to find their characters and story risible. The humour is always at their expense, making them seem ridiculous, or petty, or childish, or just unendurable. The biggest example is the Lintons, on whom these filmmakers appear to be working out their own contempt for the British, especially the upper classes. They are introduced in such ridiculous circumstances, behaving in such a parodic manner, that they never recover. It's impossible to take them seriously after that even in the rare moments the film wants you to. But this extends to Cathy and Heathcliffe. Cathy is characterized by an obnoxious childishness that grows rather than lessens with age. The character is a chittering, empty-headed fool such as you'd find Jane Austen mocking. At one point Heathcliffe becomes so exasperated he sits her on a high tree branch and leaves her there, and I wish the movie had left here there, too. The book's Cathy was tempestuous and willful, sometimes childish, sometimes knowing, but never bratty and exasperating in a privileged way. The movie doesn't seem to know what to do with her, either. She's introduced as a child having an orgasmic response to a hanging, but then as an adult shown to be such a repressed innocent that she has to A. witness the help fucking in the barn, and B. have Heathcliffe lie on top of her in a sexual manner, before she can discover masturbation, sexual desire, and her own romantic inclinations. The movie simultaneously wants her to be brimming with intrinsic lust and also a feminine innocent corrupted by others' lusts. As for Heathcliffe, he's earlier characterized as a self-sacrificing type, indeed instinctual and selfless in his extremes of self-sacrifice, before becoming a man who suddenly cannot be expected to bear anything (and, still further, Cathy's tormentor). The film holds a low opinion of its characters so often that I wondered if this was meant to be a parody--but, again, why?

Honestly, ultimately, I think Emerald Fennell is uncomfortable with the book Wuthering Heights. She didn't know what to do with a book that refuses to be the love story everyone mistakes it for, that prefers to be savage and phantasmagorical, spending noticeably more time on tormenting the children of its romantic pair than on that pair's love story, if it can be called that. It's a tribute to the novel's fearsome power that even a modern woman with considerably more knowledge of sex and violence than Emily Bronte could even dream is, nevertheless, too put out by the book to deal with it directly. So she holds it at arm's length. The film is one long record of Fennell's ambivalence and discomfort. She mocks it, she tries to outdo it, she makes it all seem fake, she ignores most of the plot--she even puts the title in quotation marks! It's almost Freudian, the avoidance here. She even has a contempt for the viewer and fans of the novel, which would seem odious if Fennell didn't come across as so troubled and uncomfortable herself.

But here and there, the film has moments. Jacob Elordi is enormously good as the returned Heathcliffe. He's neither here nor there as Young Heathcliffe, but as the mysteriously returned Heathcliffe he is impossibly good. There are scenes in the latter half that are mesmerizing, like a long encounter in the drawing room between Heathcliffe and Cathy that is electric. Notably, the rare successful moments are always the ones that hew closest to the book, where the soundtrack is turned down, the artifice drains away away, and we get a dramatic encounter between characters unmediated by the movie's ambivalence. Even Margot Robbie's wretched performance becomes competent in these moments. These moments are sad glimpses of what could've been. If the filmmakers had just gotten out of the way and let the story tell itself, this could've been amazing, to judge by those scenes where the movie comes to life. Instead we have a trash heap of bad filmmaking choices slathered all over a story that doesn't need any help to be interesting.

This had better be the worst film I see all year because I don't think I could handle anything worse.

[MichaelB]

This visual indulgence, this forcing us to gawp the performatively outré, comes at a terrible cost and that’s any and all form of emotional involvement (it’s like being told your family has just died in a horrific traffic accident by someone dressed as a Care Bear in heels). This is further augmented by the fact that Margot Robbie’s Cathy is such a two-dimensional brat she not only doesn’t undergo any type of personal growth but actively appears to regress, de-age, before our eyes, so by the time the film ends she’s essentially nothing more than an angry foetus.

The rest, which I suspect is a lot more entertaining than actually sitting through the film.

[Monterey Jack]

I loved this to death, sorry.

[Noiretirc]

I loved this to death, sorry.

This thread is for the film, not the Charli XCX soundtrack.

[Monterey Jack]

The filmmaking, the acting, the score (and, yes, even the songtrack) worked like gangbusters for me. I have a love for gushy, shameless melodrama, and this delivered in spades. I'm Team Emerald Fennell at this point.

[nicolas]

The filmmaking, the acting, the score (and, yes, even the songtrack) worked like gangbusters for me. I have a love for gushy, shameless melodrama, and this delivered in spades. I'm Team Emerald Fennell at this point.

Very, very happy to hear that. Count me in as another member of the club. I love Saltburn and think that Fennell is on a noble mission of putting out films she’d have wanted to see as a teenager instead of posh Oscar bait.

[cantinflas]

I feel like Margot and Charli vibing is more entrancing than anything the film could be.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't think we should put too much into Fennell's comments about her teenage self. That was just her excuse for doing what everyone who's adapted the book has done: cut out half the novel to focus on the Cathy/Heathcliffe romance. Otherwise the movie resembles no teenager's version of anything.

[vertigo]

My poshest source was a week ago in the same flight from London to L.A with Robbie, she was surrounded by 3, probably WB, guys. She wore a hair clip, lol, but she looked fabulous and she is not skinny (junkie looking) at all.

The data we care about, is Basque Elordi naked in the picture, yes or not?
The Aussie VOGUE sesion with the two stars is highly .... almost ....porn enough.

[Mr Sausage]

There isn't an ounce of nudity from anyone. Weird that everyone stays so clothed in a movie where a guy forcefully sucks a woman's cum off her fingers post masturbation. The movie manages to be both less and more chaste than a 60s Hammer film.

[vertigo]

There isn't an ounce of nudity from anyone. Weird that everyone stays so clothed in a movie where a guy forcefully sucks a woman's cum off her fingers post masturbation. The movie manages to be both less and more chaste than a 60s Hammer film.

Ok, thank you Mr Sausage, Fennel is very very very talented and she is very imaginative for making amazing and new? erotism and sex scenes in this explicit porn horrible and terrible times I suffer.

Well, well, well, cloths + our imagination = the new porn in 2030 agenda world.

Fennel showed us the very ugly guy from Saltburn but she does not show a single inch of the hot Basque?
Lol, happy St Valentine's day. Do they expect so much moneny, a mouth to ear reaction, from the youngest audiences at boxoffice?

[JSC]

But is the film any good?

[Noiretirc]

But is the film any good?

So far it's somewhere between being a thunderous bore and being loved to death. We live in divided times.

[Finch]

If this is the best what defenders of the film can offer in response to Mr Sausage's post, you've only convinced me further to stay away from it.

[vertigo]

Spoiler

Weird that everyone stays so clothed in a movie where a guy forcefully sucks a woman's cum off her fingers post masturbation

.

What a based words, I missed so much the internet before the bloody censorship in youtube, censorship in forums, or censorship in google.
Congratulations, you are brave, but, are you not afraid of Starmer's stasi police for the internet and for the thinking? Orwell's 1984 was the soft Disney's version.

Has not anybody in this house recognize me? You guys are so male, a male club
Well, well, well, what a success of forum, 1 post per hour. Wow, as

Spoiler

Mollusk

would say.

[MichaelB]

Has not anybody in this house recognize me?

Pretty much immediately, since you ask: I was already 99% certain before you obligingly confirmed that you'd been banned in the past under a different username.

But I'm not a mod, and so, to quote that splendid Polish phrase, "not my circus, not my monkeys".

[vertigo]

Pretty much immediately, since you ask: I was already 99% certain before you obligingly confirmed that you'd been banned in the past under a different username.
But I'm not a mod, and so, to quote that splendid Polish phrase, "not my circus, not my monkeys".

Thanks, unknown lover of good cinema, I mean, Italian. I did not know that phrase. Is it famous? I'll check it.

[HJackson]

Not to distract from whatever the hell is going on here, but I also thought this movie was pretty wretched.

Haven't read the novel since my school days so no real stake in whether it is faithful or not. I just found the whole affair horribly hollow and tacky.

[reaky]

Has not anybody in this house recognize me?

Pretty much immediately, since you ask: I was already 99% certain before you obligingly confirmed that you'd been banned in the past under a different username.

But I'm not a mod, and so, to quote that splendid Polish phrase, "not my circus, not my monkeys".

No, not my circus, but it’s irksome when one of their escaped monkeys barges into your living room while you’re chatting, puts your cup on their head, eats a coaster and soils your carpet.

[Orlac]

I remember the 1992 Wuthering Heights began with Sinead O'Connor playing Bronte, and I always wondered...did they ask Kate Bush first?

[domino harvey]

I have not seen Fennell’s other films as director but based on this mishmash of nothing, she is wholly without talent or vision, to the extent that discussing her choices seems a parlor game. There is no artistry here, just blind bluff called immediately by much of the audience, it seems (learning 2000 social media influencers were paid to hype this up sounds like money well spent once one is forced to watch what no one could mistake for the source of enthusiastic praise). One shot has little relation to the next, and had I left the theatre to visit the snack bar, there would be no fretting about missing anything-- it’d probably play better if I had left fifty times and come back to the same inconsistent collection of visuals that mean absolutely nothing and offer no possible aesthetic value, their inspiration seemingly music video randomness without a coherent throughline or vision.

Sausage has already done a great job discussing this as an adaptation, which is so toothless in its “bold” changes that it’s almost impressive. But since I think Fennell has no career or vision worth considering (food critics don’t devote fifteen paragraphs and a star rating to the kid’s meal at Shoney’s), it’s probably better to think more about the actors here. I don’t share the degree of Sausage’s enthusiasm for Elordi but I do agree that he is by far the best thing here. He is consciously playing this character as a one dimensional stoic hunk, single minded is his lust (and that’s all it ever amounts to, not love, which Fennell cannot distinguish between) but for this vision of the film, he does what he can (though it seems his direction from Fennell was that when in doubt, lick something). I would like to see him in a better film that offers him more layers to peel away/ladle on, but what’s here is probably the best anyone could do being backed into this particular corner. As for Robbie, who I have enjoyed as an actress in other films and generally considered her to be talented, this is as bad a performance as I’ve ever seen. So bad that it makes me question my assumption of her abilities. To say she misunderstands and simplifies the childish and insolent impulses of Fennell’s version of the character is putting it lightly. Did Fennell’s lack of talent as a director extend to being unable to tell this producer/star no about any of her wretched, misguided, and often embarrassing choices? Imagine thinking just being bratty is characterization, good lord what are we doing here. This is not a swing for the fences bad perf that most great actors have given us at one time or another, it is an unintentional reveal of no talent at all. So in that way perhaps Fennell felt a kinship.