"When you have a crush, anything and everything can remind you of them. Such is the case in Wuthering Heights with Cathy (Margot Robbie), who sees her desire for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) made manifest by various goos, oozes, and slimes found on the Yorkshire moors. There's little subtlety about Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, so she stuffs her film with all sorts of substances designed to remind the viewers that this is a very moist, succulent, sticky story."
"9. Pig's bloodThere's no pretending that pig's blood is hot. During one of her tantrums, Cathy walks by Heathcliff and other hired hands slaughtering a pig, the blood flooding the courtyard of Wuthering Heights. The blood seeps up the edges of her white skirts - that's going to be hellish to try to get out. Despite the fact that she brushes up against Heathcliff in attempting, and failing, to avoid the blood, the image does not really linger as one of Cathy's hornier moments."
"3. Cathy's, um, secretionsFennell's tendency to shock us only lightly comes (sorry) into full effect when Cathy steals off to the moors to masturbate against a giant rock, overwhelmed by her feelings for Heathcliff. Her beau-to-be follows her into the fields and sneaks up on her, stumbling over a rock at the last possible moment, disrupting what might have been her first actual orgasm."
The film fills its moors and interiors with viscous substances as recurring erotic symbols tied to Cathy and Heathcliff's passion. Different mucks register varying degrees of sexual provocation: pig's blood floods a courtyard and soils Cathy but reads as less erotic; a moors scene depicts Cathy masturbating against a rock, interrupted by Heathcliff, turning implied secretions into an explicitly sexual gesture; and breakfast bread dough provokes a particularly wet, sensual reaction. The ranking treats bodily fluids and malleable substances as visual metaphors for desire, with some gloop readier to arouse than others.
Read at Vulture
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