A misguided 'Wuthering Heights'

    In the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë painted a Gothic picture drenched with complex characters, class conflict, calculated cruelty, obsessive love, and haunting landscapes.

   Now, we have director Emerald Fennell’s version, which uses the novel as a springboard for a story that includes domination and submission and masturbation as a famed literary duo — Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie) — again play out their disastrous connection.

   More sensual than sensible, this Wuthering Heights includes a moment in which Heathcliff licks the wallpaper in Cathy's bedroom. How could he resist? The wallpaper had been designed to mirror Cathy's lustrous skin, including even her veins.

  Apart from the novel, my favorite Wuthering Heights adaptation remains director William Wyler’s 1939 version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Devotees of the novel complained that Wyler had softened Bronte's story of insanely possessive love. It was a fair criticism. The novel never was an exaltation of romantic love, as has sometimes been proclaimed.

   In the 2026 version, Fennell performs open-heart surgery on the story in an attempt to reveal the gooey ooze of its innards and palpitating passions. 

   I admired the audaciousness of Fennell’s previous work (Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) but found her Wuthering Heights to be a sometimes silly attempt at giving a 19th-century novel some contemporary spin. 

   Moreover, the movie’s preoccupation with production design and costume prove distracting. The costumes, particularly Cathy's ridiculously ornate dresses and jewelry are presented as emblems of ostentation, snarky, overstated jokes. The same goes for the preposterous decor of the upscale manse where Linton (Shazad Latif), a landed aristocrat, cloisters Cathy. 

   When Linton becomes Cathy's husband, the marriage provides the main reason for Heathcliff -- Cathy's poor unrefined soul mate -- to vanish from the West Yorkshire moors for five years. He returns as a wealthy man who purchases Wuthering Heights, the place where he and Cathy grew up,  a downscale slide from Linton's carefully manicured Thrushcross Grange estate.

   I’m not going to rehash the story here, but Fennell, who also wrote the screenplay, presents it in outline form, establishing a bond between Robbie’s Cathy and Elordi’s Heathcliff early on and carrying it through to what’s presented as a tragic conclusion for two people who are treated as symbols of an enduring link that can't be broken.

  Many characters from the book have been excised. Among those that remain: Hong Chau plays Nelly Dean, Cathy’s devoted and perhaps cunning companion; i.e., a servant. Martin Clunes portrays Cathy’s father, a debauched, alcoholic gambler, a gaseous human belch of a man.

  Then there’s Isabella (Alison Oliver), Linton’s bird-brained ward, who — in this version — consents to being abused and demeaned by Heathcliff as part of his vengeful manipulations. Who knew? Isabella’s into degradation. Heathcliff's marriage to her is an undisguised act of revenge.

   The movie begins when Cathy and Heathcliff (Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper) are children who witness a public hanging, an event that establishes Cathy as a grinning, untamed child who seems to enjoy the brutal moment.

    Soon after the hanging, Cathy's father rescues Heathcliff from the streets and decides to raise him. Cooper, who delivered an amazing performance in the series Adolescence, suggests depths that the screenplay never plumbs when the adult Heathcliff arrives. I half-wished the movie had remained in Cathy and Heathcliff's childhoods.

   As for the main actors, Robbie turns Cathy into a woman of bratty insistence. I wasn’t sure what Elordi was doing as Heathcliff. At times, he seemed to be posing for a Hunks of the Moors calendar.  His Yorkshire accent proves variable. 

   In the novel, Heathcliff is described as dark of complexion, and some have argued that Heathcliff should have been played by an actor of color. Heathcliff's skin tones aren't all that define him, though. Rejection and mistreatment have bent him toward obsession and longing. 

   Fennell has taken a classic story and tried to burnish it with a variety of outre flourishes that play like italicized statements. The riches of Thrushcross Range contrast obviously with Wuthering Heights, the decaying house in which Cathy and Heathcliff were raised, and which here looks as if it might double as a set for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

   So, no, this is not your grandmother's Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy eventually consummate their relationship to the accompaniment of much heaving breath. Cathy and Heathcliff are often caught standing in downpours; they're awash in nature or maybe they don't have enough sense to get out of the rain. 

    But such melodramatic touches, Anthony Willis' brooding aggressive score and the use of tunes by Charli xcx suggest that Brontë’s work needed boosting, perhaps due to 19th century period constraints. If so, it's a misguided choice: Bronte's resonant themes should have been enough to provide some insight into our wealth-gap dominated moment.

   Fennell has put the movie's official title in quotations, a signal that her interpretation will be, to put it mildly, "liberal."  Purists may see this 2026 version more as vandalization than interpretation, but it's probably too much to say that Fennell has made a Wuthering Heights in name only. Still, it’s close enough to let the idea roll around in your mind before moving on.

One very weird summer vacation

 

   Emerald Fennell's Saltburn skewers those who aspire to the heights of wealth and privilege, with the writer/director indulging her taste for evisceration, exaggeration, and obvious provocation.

    Fennell focuses on Oliver Quick, an Oxford student played by Barry Keoghan. The bookish Quick, whose name sounds as if it were lifted from a Dickens' novel, attracts the attention of one of Oxfords  cool guys (Jacob Elordi). 

     Increasingly comfortable with his newfound acceptance, Oliver tells Elordi's Felix that he won't be going home for the summer, despite the recent death of his alcoholic father. He says he can't bear to be around his mentally deranged mother; he wants to keep his high-achieving life on track.

  Perhaps out of pity or maybe because he's kind, Felix invites Oliver to visit Saltburn, the massive estate where his family lives in aristocratic splendor and where Felix, despite his obvious entitlement,  seems closest to normal.

  Turns out the rest of Felix's family consists of bizarrely drawn characters, all vividly sketched in caricature fashion. Mom (Rosamund Pike) speaks through clenched teeth, launching acidic barbs in all directions; Dad (Richard E. Grant) seems monumentally out of touch; sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) reeks of trouble. Her mother describes her as "sexually incontinent."

  Two additional characters took up residence at Saltburn before Oliver's arrival. These hangers-on include another Oxford student (Archie Madekwe), a young man who's somehow related to the family and a family friend (Carey Mulligan) who insists on spewing repeated tales of the catastrophes that have befallen her. 

  The butler (Paul Rhys) seems to regard himself as superior to one and all. Perhaps he's the referee in a game in which the participants have lost sight of all boundary lines.

   OK, sounds like we're on the road to a broadly conceived comedy of manners but Fennell, who directed Promising Young Woman, has other things in mind. Her movie becomes increasingly bizarre -- perhaps even perverse. That shift gathers force when Oliver, whose creepy leanings already have been established, climbs into the bathtub where Felix recently had been bathing and, by the way, masturbating. Oliver starts to drink the bathwater as it swirls down the drain.

    Clearly, Oliver is not what he seems. You certainly wouldn't want to ask him how he spent his summer vacation.

    The detail about the bathtub might be a spoiler; I include it to ward off the squeamish and to demonstrate that Fennell specializes in sights intended to make us wince, perhaps the equivalent of the queasy responses elicited by graphically repellent gore in horror films.

    I'd be lying if I didn't say that some of this is entertaining and funny -- in a twisted sort of way. 

    Like Promising Woman, Saltburn wraps up with far-fetched twists that continue Fennell's outrageous march through developments that are meant, I think, to encourage us to look back and search for clues that might have tipped us off to where the movie was headed.

     On one level, Saltburn -- by including images that invite averted eyes  -- can be viewed as a movie that dresses for dinner and then throws up on itself. On another, it's a daring comic display of the base motivations that underly class privilege.

    Whatever view you take -- and I'd opt for the latter -- Fennell takes us on a ride that bounces over some wicked bumps. Obviously I can't know her intent, but by the look of things, I'd guess, as was the case in Promising Woman,  that she prefers comedy that leaves bite marks.

A revenge movie with topical thrust

 

    A 35-year-old woman gets drunk at a club and goes home with a stranger. What, we ask? Another movie about a confused single woman who stumbles toward late-picture self-realization? Or worse, a looming romcom?

    Wrong.

     In the hands of first-time director Emerald Fennell and star Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman becomes something more. 

     Turns out that Mulligan's Cassie (short for Cassandra) is an avenger. Born into a world of tolerated sexual abuse, Cassie feigns drunken submission before humiliating the horny but unsuspecting guys she picks up.

      Cassie, who dropped out of medical school, works as a barista in a coffee shop owned by the savvy Gail (Lavern Cox), a character who helps fulfill the movie's wisecrack quota.

    I won't tell you what pushed Cassie into an under-achieving life devoted to avenging herself on men but the explanation allows Fennell to assay some of the ways in which women who've been abused can be treated.

     Ruthless as she can be with men, Cassie hasn't totally give up on the opposite sex. Ryan (Bo Burnham) shows up at the coffee shop: A pediatric surgeon, Ryan attended med school with Cassie. He knows that she's whip-smart and begins his pursuit. Cassie doesn't make it easy for him, but he persists and ultimately, her cast-iron will begins to bend.

     A supporting cast that includes Alison Brie and Connie Britton, also boasts a fine small performance by Alfred Molina as a regretful, self-hating lawyer.

     Mulligan ably fills the movie's center, even if you can see some of the twists coming and an exaggerated conflation of events strains credibility at the very end.

      Maybe it doesn't matter. Fennell, the actress who plays Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown and who served as a show runner on the Killing Eve series, knows that when you put so much in motion, there must be an out-sized payoff. She tries hard to deliver, but this could be a case in which the finale would be better appreciated in a theater where a vocally responsive audience might add some extra charge. 

      Still,  Fennell creates a pointed bit of entertainment that may not be perfect but leaves you eager to see more.