"How Fennell's Wuthering Heights came to be a pretty basic tale of two conventionally attractive, weird (but not too weird!) people who are hot for each other is a mystery. Fennell has described Wuthering Heights as a canonical text in her teenage years, and furthermore seems to have actually read the book, which is no small feat, since it's a densely written beozar of fractured timelines, oscillating narrators, and multiple characters with the same names."
"If anyone could pull off a film that accurately captures the novel's complicated vibes, it would be Fennell. Her most recent film Saltburn (2023) felt-despite its '00s setting-like fan fiction set in a Wuthering Heights extended universe (especially the grave-fucking). This new version has any potentially sharp edges dulled even further by disregarding the fact that in Brontë's book, the character of Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is clearly coded as nonwhite, and Elordi is a very white guy."
Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights adaptation presents a surprisingly tame, stylishly bloody version of Emily Brontë's novel. The film includes child abuse, a public execution, hog butchering, and a finger penetrating a fish in aspic, but the sex is depicted as consensual and the violence feels less extreme than expected. The adaptation reduces the novel's complex fractured timelines, oscillating narrators, and overlapping character names to a straightforward romance between two conventionally attractive, mildly eccentric lovers. Fennell reportedly read the canonical text and previously made Saltburn, which resembled Wuthering Heights fan fiction. The production casts Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, whose racial coding in the novel is not honored, while nonwhite actors appear in other supporting roles.
Read at Portland Mercury
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