"A snail leaves a languid slime trail across a window pane, a housemaid squishes shiny dough provocatively between her fingers while making bread at the kitchen table, a scarred back is shown beaded with sweat in a loving close-up - Emerald Fennell's take on the 1847 Emily Brontë novel practically glistens with fluids. When Heathcliff, a foundling, discovers that Cathy Earnshaw, the daughter of the impoverished Yorkshire lord"
"And just when it seems like all this oleaginousness is Fennell's way of visualizing Victorian subtext, repressed lust oozing out in the form of other sorts of lubrication, we get a scene in which a grown Cathy, played by Margot Robbie, is caught masturbating out on the moors by Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who promptly grabs the hand she's trying to embarrassedly wipe on her skirt, sniffs, and then licks it. Who needs repression when you can have foreplay?"
The film luxuriates in tactile, fluid imagery: snail slime, dough, beaded sweat, egg yolk, and a masturbatory encounter culminating in licking. Bodies, clothing, and weather repeatedly become sources of slippery, oleaginous sensation that foreground physicality and erotic charge. The movie privileges extravagant, lizard-brain moments and pop-music-scored montages that deliver immediate sensory pleasure. Visual richness and the ability to orchestrate arresting, sensual set pieces coexist with a relative lack of thematic incisiveness or sustained moral probing. Promising Young Woman and Saltburn exhibit similar tendencies toward spectacle that undercut deeper thematic ambitions.
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