"Even with just two feature films under her belt, one has come to expect a certain level of depravity from Emerald Fennell. The director of Promising Young Woman and has built a brand out of wicked acts; love her or hate her, you can at least trust her to push, to provoke, where others would never think to. She's a curator of scandalous shocks, and though most are a flash in the pan, Fennell seized a plum opportunity to defy that streak with Wuthering Heights."
"Like thorns choking a garden wall, discourse sprang up around the film from the moment Fennell unveiled her racy vision for it. But what's disappointing about Wuthering Heights is its failure to actually meet the moment. The internet imagined a play on pulpy, horny Harlequin novels, or a cheeky self-insert framing with Margot Robbie's Catherine Earnshaw, but Fennell takes no such swings here."
"The OG Wuthering Heights is a prickly, haunting text, overwrought with ghostly specters, 19th century prejudice, and hatred so intense it corrupts to the core. Fennell guts a lot of that to get to the heart of this story, the tragic romance between the bratty Catherine and the gruff Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). The pair have been inseparable since childhood, when Catherine's father (Martin Clunes) rescued the latter from a life of indentured servitude and made him her ward."
Emerald Fennell has cultivated a reputation for provocative, boundary-pushing filmmaking. Her Wuthering Heights adaptation aims for a fresh, racy reinvention but ultimately avoids the anticipated scandal or bold apocryphal reimagining. The film offers striking visuals and intentionally anachronistic costumes, but it trims much of the original novel's gothic, social, and spectral darkness to foreground the tragic romance between Catherine and Heathcliff. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff opposite Margot Robbie's Catherine; their childhood bond begins when Mr. Earnshaw rescues Heathcliff and names him a ward. The adaptation's restraint renders the resurrection more curious than necessary.
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