Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" Is Extravagantly Superficial

"This latest effort comes from the English director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, who previously made " Saltburn " (2023), a garish eat-the-rich satire that is best appreciated, in retrospect, as a warmup for this movie. In unleashing her camera on the fictional grounds of Saltburn, a centuries-old estate in the English countryside, Fennell was perhaps already testing out visual ideas for Thrushcross Grange, where Brontë's heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, dooms herself to a comfortable, loveless marriage with the wealthy Edgar Linton."

"The nadir of "Saltburn" was an interminably jejune sequence in which Oliver, a horndog psychopath played by Barry Keoghan, stripped down and rubbed himself against a freshly tilled grave. It was also perhaps the movie's most morbidly Brontë-esque moment, and, settling into "Wuthering Heights," I braced myself for a similarly debauched interpretation of the novel's famous exhumation scene. Would Heathcliff (Elordi), digging up his late, beloved Catherine (Margot Robbie), subject her casket to desecration by dry humping?"

Emerald Fennell's film adapts Wuthering Heights with a heavy emphasis on stylized visuals and shock tactics, favoring spectacle over the novel's psychological complexity. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Catherine and Heathcliff as paper-doll, superficially glamorous figures whose emotions register more as postures than inner turmoil. The film recasts elements from Fennell's previous Saltburn by testing visual ideas on grand estates and by courting provocation. A notorious exhumation is handled with restraint, yet other sequences revel in jolting, garish imagery. The result is an extravagant, redundant retelling that prioritizes aesthetic bravado at the expense of depth.

Read at The New Yorker