"You'll be sorely disappointed if you pick up Wuthering Heights after this. Emily Brontë's 1847 novel is a slow read with an out-of-time atmosphere, really one of the most virginal and repressed romance stories of all time. That's not something I picked up on myself as a child, but reading as an adult, you're like, All this drama-aren't they even going to make out?"
"The unconsummated love and undying obsession between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and her unruly adopted brother Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi)? Well, they're grown and fucking. The novel's heavy psychosexual undertones and implied intergenerational trauma? It's right out there in the open, wearing bondage gear. It's not a bad idea. Fennell's approach opens up an endless well of drama and symbolism, which she plumbs for an imaginative and overwrought movie with the sumptuous swag of high period drama and the garish flair of Melania Trump's Christmas."
"In an era of instant gratification and few taboos, how to represent an antique story so entirely conditioned on denial and restraint? Fennell's screenplay strips out the story-within-a-story structure, sidelines major characters, and simplifies the multi-generational plot-all regular book adaptation stuff. These also happen to be the distinct formal characteristics of Wuthering Heights, qualities that make it a peculiar, multifaceted historical novel and not a more straightforward bodice ripper with shades of the step-siblings on PornHub."
The 1847 novel is slow, out-of-time, and characterized by virginal, repressed romance. The new film adaptation makes the novel's emotional subtext explicit, depicting consummated sex, psychosexual undertones, and intergenerational trauma overtly and provocatively. The screenplay removes the story-within-a-story framing, sidelines major characters, and simplifies the multi-generational plot, trading formal complexity for a more direct melodrama. The adaptation mines drama and symbolism for an imaginative, overwrought period movie with sumptuous style and garish flourishes. The first on-screen sexual encounter is intensely charged, but subsequent scenes fail to match that chemistry, and the film feels tediously long.
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