"More than a decade ago, The New Yorker published a piece titled "Can Wuthering Heights Work Onscreen?," in which my now-colleague Joshua Rothman argued that Emily Bronte's classic is beloved "not just for its romance but also for its strangeness, its intensity, and its violence." These qualities, he noted, are often left out of the many films and miniseries the book has inspired, which tend to reduce the story to the doomed romance of Catherine and Heathcliff."
"The extravagant new movie "Wuthering Heights," written and directed by the English filmmaker Emerald Fennell, is very much in this vein; it could be the most reductive version of this material ever made. But I can't say I was ever bored. As she demonstrated in her wild satirical thriller Saltburn, from 2023, Fennell cares little for subtlety, and here she's made an ode to mad, passionate excess."
Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights emphasizes strangeness, intensity, and violence through lavish, flamboyant visuals and melodrama rather than subtle psychological complexity. The film centers on a tense, quasi-incestuous bond between Catherine and Heathcliff, portrayed by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and traces Catherine's wild youth on the Yorkshire moors, her marriage to wealthy Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff's furious departure and later return with fortune and vengeance. Fennell prefers broad, excess-driven stylistic choices—likened to bright red spray paint—resulting in a reductive but vividly energetic and never-boring adaptation.
Read at www.npr.org
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