Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has premiered to a fiercely divided critical reception, with one reviewer dismissing it as an “emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire” while another lauded it as “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”.
The film, from the director behindSaltburn, is described as a very loose interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic gothic novel. Fennell has stated that the adaptation aims to recall her own experience of reading the text as a teenager.
Among the positive appraisals, the BBC awarded the film four stars, noting: “Under it all, Fennell channels something essential in the book – the corrosive behaviour that can result from thwarted desire. Jealousy, anger and vengeance are as natural to Cathy and Heathcliff as their endless passion for each other. If you embrace the film’s audacious style and think of it as a reinvention not an adaptation, this bold, artful Wuthering Heights is utterly absorbing.”
Similarly, Robbie Collin of The Telegraph bestowed a five-star rating, praising it as “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”. He added: “It’s an obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions.”
He continued: “Is it as lewd as Saltburn? I’d say it’s lewder, if slightly less graphic. In some ways, it’s a traditional bodice-ripper – bosoms heave, flanks trickle with sweat – though again, bodily fluids are savoured, while Saltburn’s Alison Oliver makes a devilishly funny and unsettling return as Miss Isabella, Linton’s initially meek and genteel ward.”
However, other critics were less impressed. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the film two stars, contending it “doesn’t have the live-ammo impact” of Fennell’s previous works, Saltburn and the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman. He elaborated: “For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.”
The Times’ Kevin Maher also rated it two stars, criticising the “chemistry-free central romance between the bizarrely uninteresting Heathcliff and Cathy”. He added: “There are conspicuous longueurs and characterisations that barely reflect the complexity of an Instagram reel let alone the greatest gothic novel in English literature.”
Maher further described Robbie’s Cathy as living “entirely on the surface like Bronte Barbie and never burns from the core”, while Elordi’s Heathcliff was a “fatally shallow characterisation”, a “pouty man-candy with a shaky Yorkshire accent and, by chuffing ’eck, an alarmingly overexposed tongue”.
The Independent’s own Clarisse Loughrey awarded the film a single star, calling it “an astonishingly hollow work”. She argued: “It uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable.”
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Loughrey observed that Heathcliff “has become a wet-eyed, Mills & Boon mirage created entirely to induce swooning, always on standby to shield Cathy from the cold and rain. How infinitely dull he is compared to the complicated, challenging figure we meet in the book.” She concluded that while Robbie and Elordi “don’t entirely lack chemistry, but their characters do feel so thinned out that their performances are pushed almost to the border of pantomime. She’s wilful and spiky. He’s rough but gentle. That’s about it.”
This highly polarising adaptation of Wuthering Heights is scheduled for release in UK cinemas on 13 February.
