“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

[Mr Sausage]

You can chalk up my enthusiasm for Elordi as a need to grasp at any enjoyable element in the movie like a drowning man grasps at a life preserver.

[swo17]

I have not seen Fennell’s other films as director but based on this mishmash of nothing, she is wholly without talent or vision

This may very well be irredeemable garbage but I still think you might get something out of Promising Young Woman, particularly given its thematic and cast connections to Veronica Mars

[domino harvey]

I’ll have to see it when I pick the Best Picture watching back up, so I hope you’re right!

[ryannichols7]

I didn't want any connection with this thread, director, or film at all, but I really appreciate the edit to the thread title

[therewillbeblus]

I really appreciate the edit to the thread title

That's actually how it's being marketed, with quotes, since Fennell has been open about this being her own riff on the novel rather than an attempt at straight adaptation

[Mr Sausage]

Scare quoting her own movie title is the most honest she's been about this project.

[therewillbeblus]

It's a real shame that Fennell has made this movie - which I haven't seen yet, but that is (by seemingly all accounts) devoid of the rich themes in her other work. However, I've come to believe that these profundities were often happy accidents rather than intentional, going by her interviews

[Walter Kurtz]

Mr. Vertigo... you are aptly named.

[Never Cursed]

domino and Sausage have summed up this film's problems very well, so the only thing I'll really add is to remark upon the astonishing juvenility of the movie's attitudes towards sex. Though the film is so over-the-top and intentionally explicit, unpleasant and clichéd in an attempt to be outré, it also plays a cruel and hypocritical game with the viewer in rendering all sexual activity either gross and repulsive or else forbidden and unwise (in Cathy and Heathcliff's trysts). Fennell has no reason to set up such farcically prurient forays into pseudo-BDSM, degradation, and petplay unless she either likes depicting it or else has something to say about it. Both of those motivations are actually valid - you can find BDSM hot, or you can show how it says something about its practitioners - but Fennell doesn't seem to be confident (or artistically well-equipped) enough to take either of those stances. Instead, her film displays an ill-articulated erotic fascination with the idea of these things happening to/around the book's characters (wouldn't it be so much better if Cathy and Heathcliff fucked? wouldn't it be crazy if Heathcliff treated his wife like shit?) with juuuust enough circumspect, "who, me?" denial to push some dirt over her actual motivations. Again, the first part of this is acceptable. You're allowed to think it would be hot if Wuthering Heights was smutty instead of agonizingly restrained and depressing. But making it all gross and evil, covering everything in egg white or snail trail or other kinds of translucent slime and branding it forbidden, displays a middle-school level of discomfort with sexuality. The one thing that I do disagree with Sausage about is when he said that the movie "resembles no teenager's version of anything." I actually think it resembles very closely one very specific kind of adolescent cultural product: this is filmed Wuthering Heights fanfiction. One could hem and haw and debate over whether this is a "loose adaptation" or a "reimagining" or whatever descriptor, but I think the label of "fanfiction" cuts through the noise and succinctly explains both the graphic, ill-placed sexual content and Fennell's pained, secretive insistence that she isn't doing or into whatever it is she's doing or into. You could frame some of this material or the approach to it in a few different ways (a lot of the film more generally is a pathetic Poor Things ripoff, for instance), but this approach struck me as the most pertinent.

All that notwithstanding, this is one of the most visually incoherent big-budget movies I've ever seen. It is electrifying, in a way, to see expensive VistaVision footage shot by someone who doesn't really know where to place cameras so that the images they produce will line up in an editing bay, in the same way that it's sometimes amusing to see someone light a cigar with a $100 bill. Elordi is a talented actor (and his affinity for this kind of character is used to much greater returns in Euphoria), the kids are pretty good, and Linus Sandgren is great at lighting shots. Too bad about pretty much everything else.

The only real question I have: domino, why on earth did you see this in theaters?

[domino harvey]

My wife wanted to see it (and she loved it)

[Noiretirc]

My wife wanted to see it (and she loved it)

Does she read CF.org?

[Toland's Mitchell]

^ I read CF.org, and this thread is dissuasive to say the least. I'm a fan of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, and would like to see Fennell continue good film-making. But yikes, "Wuthering Heights" doesn't appear to be. I'll still eventually see it and form my own opinion. I just hope that if I find it bad, that it doesn't also undermine my fondness for her two former films. It probably wouldn't, as they are all separate unique works. Nevertheless, filmmakers sometimes go on artistic tangents and impulses that don't work. And it's fine, so long as they grow from it, and do better on their next project.

[domino harvey]

To be clear, the above user is not my wife! She doesn’t have any great passion for movies, but obviously knows I do and knows I post here, but as far as I know she doesn’t read the board

[Toland's Mitchell]

Lol, the notion I could be possibly misunderstood as domino's wife never crossed my mind! I was merely piggybacking the previous posts. We've been on the site long enough that other CF users know we're not related, plus I made it clear I have not seen Wuthering Heights, haha.

[therewillbeblus]

The giveaway was that domino's name isn't Toland

[swo17]

domino, it's me, Toland's Mitchell
I've come home, I'm so cold
Let me in your window

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

[Noiretirc]

My little joke grew legs.

[JamesF]

As someone who called a certain scene in Saltburn “the stupidest thing I’ve seen on a cinema screen all year” on this very board and went into this film with rock-bottom expectations - God help me, I actually really quite enjoyed it. The closest reference I can think of is Coppola’s Dracula, which is surely an influence: absolute nonsense as an adaptation, and far from an unqualified triumph, but a total hoot if you can tune in on its maximalist ridiculousness as an exercise in style. We’ve had plenty of sober, “proper” adaptations of the book, why not one seemingly ripped from the chaotic hormonal imagination of an immature teenager doodling swear words and knob gags in the margins in the novel? To this end, the heightened cinematography, music and production design were all on point to me, especially the latter, somewhere between Eiko Ishioka and Carol Spier. Unlike Hamnet and Frankenstein most recently, I can at least say I was never bored.

Spoiler

Shoutout to Martin Clunes for going full Lon Chaney in his final scenes.

[MichaelB]

My regular commentary partner Johnny Mains also thoroughly enjoyed it, also completely against expectations.

I might see if my wife's up for it; she might well be.

The big question is: should I finally get round to reading the book first?

[knives]

Spoiler

Shoutout to Martin Clunes for going full Lon Chaney in his final scenes.

Dang it. I did not want a reason to see this.

[GaryC]

I have heard comments (from people whose opinion I usually trust, who liked the film) that it's something like a Ken Russell take on a literary adaptation. Clearly it's up to you whether that's a plus or a minus.

As for the novel, I read it at university, with my other Brontë novels Jane Eyre (also at university) and Villette (shortly afterwards). I've not got to Charlotte's other two and Anne's two, but would like to sometime. I did wonder about rereading Wuthering Heights in time for this new film version, but that didn't happen.

[TechnicolorAcid]

I have heard comments (from people whose opinion I usually trust, who liked the film) that it's something like a Ken Russell take on a literary adaptation. Clearly it's up to you whether that's a plus or a minus.

I haven’t seen the movie (probably never will) but based on everything I know about it and Russell’s work, I think the people calling it a Ken Russell take on Wuthering Heights are missing the fact that a key factor of Russell’s cinema is a sense of genuine love for the subjects he’s writing about. Even in something like the manic acid trip of Tommy, there’s clearly a sense of sympathy Russell has for him as he silently pleads out for a cure and that sympathy is what makes works like The Devils and The Music Lovers so harrowing.
I presume stylistically there could be some connections but I ultimately feel like Fennell’s film probably is honing all in on its cinematography/vaguely romantic tone and tossing away any real feelings about its characters or story as a result (people who’ve seen this, please correct me), which is not something I’d imagine Ken Russell doing based on his adaptations that I have seen. Really think about what Women in Love would look like if Russell didn’t add keep any of Lawrence’s class-based rage or his high-strung eroticism and made it a happy love story instead vaguely masked in semi-taboo ideas, that would probably be a lot worse than the current version and one of the reasons Russell was able to avoid this fate is because he didn’t read the book in puberty and never pick it up again.
Again I’m basing this off my perceptive of what this film is like (someone please correct if I’m wrong about my assumptions about this film) but I imagine I’m not really that far off from what it’s actually like and ultimately, I’m just really tired of a lot of these bland, “extravagant” works being labeled as the Ken Russell take on this or that and I figured I’d put my voice in so people can stop throwing these accusations around, it happened with Baz Luhrmann and I hope it doesn’t start up again with Fennell.

[The Curious Sofa]

...and there I was thinking Yorgos Lanthimos was this generation's Ken Russell.

[TechnicolorAcid]

...and there I was thinking Yorgos Lanthimos was this generation's Ken Russell.

Actually I didn’t think of him but now that you mention him, there’s a pretty good argument for him being this generation’s Ken Russell, at least much more than there is for Emerald Fennell.