"It does not take long into Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Bronte's English lit classic, for one to detect the film-maker's true faith. It is not to the challenging and beloved gothic novel of emotional repression and inheritance; as with many other cinematic adaptations, Fennell dispenses with the unruly latter half of the book, along with most of its conventions."
"In closeup, sweat beads and drips down a spine; snail slime indolently streaks a window; freshly poured pig blood mucks Cathy's dress. Desire, less suggested than enforced, stains everything. Early in the film, just after the abrupt ageing of Cathy and Heathcliff from boundless children (played by Charlotte Mellington and Adolescence's Owen Cooper) to unspecific adults, Elordi's brooding, beastly Heathcliff catches Robbie's blonde Cathy, furiously horny after a bit of light voyeurism, pleasuring herself against the windswept rocks."
Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights discards much of the latter half and many gothic conventions in favor of a maximalist, sensory-driven vision. Cathy and Heathcliff are presented as tortuously connected figures who swoon across the Yorkshire moors in extravagant, anachronistic formalwear, unconstrained by period decorum. The film foregrounds sticky, explicit imagery—sweat, snail slime, pig blood—and treats desire as overt and staining. A notable early sequence abruptly ages the characters and stages an explicitly sexual encounter. The director's reliance on shock and luxe visuals has proven divisive, echoing prior provocative moments in her work.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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