"Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Emily Brontë's groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date-a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. The camera lingers on dripping egg yolks and squishy, bubbling dough; the protagonist, Cathy Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie), must wade through pig's blood on her way to the moors near her home, leaving a trim of viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress. This is Fennell's aesthetic throughout: loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface."
"The clash of beauty and filth is well-suited for Brontë's desolate tale of romance in a tempestuous climate, where Cathy is constantly caught between Victorian propriety and her baser, wilder nature. Fennell's take is thuddingly blunt; it brings the book's simmering sexual repression to a boil. Wuthering Heights, sprawling and objectively tough to capture faithfully, hinges on the unbalanced, teenage energy of its central relationship-here, expressed through glossy, MTV-esque visuals that the director deploys with aplomb."
Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Wuthering Heights pairs lavish, glossy visuals with visceral, gruesome imagery to underscore the novel's clash between propriety and baser impulses. The film foregrounds the adolescent, unbalanced passion between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff, bringing simmering sexual repression to a boil. Major characters and the novel's sprawling later chapters are trimmed or omitted, streamlining the narrative to a tighter focus on the central relationship from quasi-feral childhood onward. The narrowed scope sacrifices some of the book's loopy later complexities but renders the story more nimble, immediate, and provocatively polarizing.
Read at The Atlantic
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