The quotation marks around the title of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights are a copy editor’s nightmare, and a savvy filmmaker’s idea of a gimmick, or maybe plausible deniability. “I think it’s a lot of things,” explained the Oscar-winning director in an interview with Fandango about the stylized moniker of her stridently artificial, Charli xcx–ified adaptation of the novel for her third feature, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff. “Primarily it’s [because] the book means so much to me, and it means so much to so many people.”
It’s hard to argue with the second part. Emily Brontë’s novel is a classic, having amassed a devoted fan base since its publication in 1847. Brattish, to-the-manor-born Catherine Earnshaw and her desirous adopted brother Heathcliff—childhood sweethearts bonded in trauma who grow up into lovers nearly as star cross’d as Romeo and Juliet—have uncanny staying power in the popular imagination, as do the windswept moors that serve as a backdrop for their bad romance. High school English majors, Death Cab for Cutie, Yoko Ono, Carrie Bradshaw (the book is listed as being overdue on her library card in the Sex and the City movie); the list goes on. Ditto filmmakers: More than 20 screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights exist, including William Wyler’s handsomely mounted classic with Laurence Olivier as a brooding Heathcliff, and a doozy by Luis Buñuel; more recently, Andrea Arnold staged a grittier, more naturalistic version.
Brontë was a prodigy as well as an outsider over the course of her short life, and Wuthering Heights bristles with both writerly ambition and bad vibes. The book was received with a mix of bafflement and scandal when it was released under the pseudonym of “Ellis Bell”; its grim, unsentimental observations about race, class, familial dysfunction, and the debilitating nature of infatuation belong vividly to their period while also signifying powerfully into the present tense. It’s spooky and swoony, a bad romance whose characters are haunted by illicit, irreconcilable desires. Ghosts and taboos abound; the image of Heathcliff lurking beside Cathy’s grave, scheming to dig his way inside and glance at his beloved’s mouldering countenance. “I thought, once, I would have stayed there; when I saw her face again—it is hers yet!”—lives rent-free in the mind’s eye.
“Let me in your window,” wailed Kate Bush up and down the pentatonic scale in her 1978 debut single “Wuthering Heights,” adopting the persona of Cathy’s spirit, pleading futilely to Heathcliff from the other side of the great beyond. The space between life and death—and also fidelity and invention—is charged with fantastic possibilities; an intrepid artist like Bush forges her way through. Listening to “Wuthering Heights” is transporting; watching Wuthering Heights is confusing, and enervating. It’s hard to say what, exactly, Brontë’s book means to Fennell, beyond the opportunity to renovate its eponymous, Gothic intellectual property and extend her own brand as a reigning multiplex provoc-auteur. The film is too severe to be a guilty pleasure and too goofy to take seriously; and is hampered by a lack of visual or dramatic imagination. In lieu of a true full-frontal assault, we get a neutered nothingburger of a movie: another addition to a body of work that flaunts its own willful inauthenticity as a badge of honor. Call it the cinema of scare quotes.
To give credit where it’s due, Fennell does have a way with names; the title of 2020’s Promising Young Woman worked nicely as a triple entendre referring simultaneously to its self-styled, avenging-angel heroine, her tragically deceased BFF, and the writer-director behind them both. But even before that buzzy, Black-Listed screenplay was acquired by Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment in 2019, Fennell was already a known commodity, having acted in a number of U.K. television series and films and published several novels. Meanwhile, her gig as the head writer for the second season of Killing Eve, arranged by her friend and former costar Phoebe Waller-Bridge, suggested a symbolic passing of the torch from one sly London-born multihyphenate to another. Most conspicuously of all, Fennell played Camilla Parker Bowles on Season 4 of The Crown, smartly inhabiting one of the most ambivalent figures in contemporary British public life: “[I] am very grateful that my teenage years have well prepared me for playing a chain-smoking serial snogger with a pudding-bowl haircut,” she told Vogue.
Such ostensibly rapier-tipped wit was Fennell’s calling card, and Promising Young Woman strives at all times for maximum quotability: The script is an exercise in booby-trapped jouissance, a veritable minefield of explosive one-liners. The sharpest tongue belongs to Carey Mulligan’s—again, symbolically named—Cassie; like her mythical namesake Cassandra, she’s a truth-teller who deals in ominous prophecies, to the point where she seems to foresee her own impending doom. “Every week, I go to a club, and every week, I act like I am too drunk to stand,” she explains. “And every fucking week, a nice guy comes over to see if I’m OK.” Such is the methodology—and psychology—of a character who has made it her mission to hunt down everyday sexual predators by styling herself as a textbook party-girl-victim, falling helplessly into their arms, snapping to attention, and cutting them to ribbons … verbally speaking.
Cassie isn’t just doing this as a public service: She’s motivated by the memory of her former med-school classmate Nina, who killed herself in the wake of a brutal, and very public, act of sexual assault perpetrated by a group of fellow students. (The phrase “promising young woman” is, of course, a shot across the bow of Brock Turner; the film’s male characters are made strategically in his frat-boy image). The setup of a wisecracking misandrist vigilante is terrifically pressurized, and Mulligan is excellent in the part, but the air goes out of the movie pretty quick. The idea that our heroine is willingly and consistently putting herself in danger in order to occupy some kind of moral high ground—chiding her pickups about their essential shittiness before strutting away with both parties unscathed—indicates the curious mix of righteousness and illogic at the heart of Fennell’s script, which plays as a series of crowd-pleasing set pieces bereft of connective tissue. Not only does Cassie’s convoluted and ultimately self-destructive crusade make little sense as either a sustained attack on patriarchy or an expression of sublimated grief, but the film around her is so self-consciously over-produced—all blatantly obvious needle drops and coyly color-coded, pop-art production design—that it loses traction as any kind of realistic systemic critique. Instead, it feels show-offy, and, above all, memeable—a case of a director seizing the moment, for better or for worse.
Promising Young Woman is weirdly afraid to get its hands dirty: The revelation that Cassie is covered in ketchup rather than gore during the opening credit sequence not only riffs on (or, more accurately, rips off) Mary Harron’s visual pun off the top of American Psycho, but it functions as a metonym for Fennell’s own queasiness. The film may wear its heart on its sleeve as an earnest, angry, post-#MeToo allegory, but its bloodlessness is a major issue. As Ayesha A. Siddiqi notes in her devastating and definitive takedown—one of the great pieces of contemporary film criticism—Fennell’s fable plays as a rape-revenge thriller minus the revenge, effectively cancelling itself out. “Review after review claims [the film] is a feminist triumph,” she writes acidly. “Where exactly are they locating that triumph? History isn’t made by well behaved dead women.” It’s telling that Fennell reportedly backtracked on the bleakness of the film’s original finale, tacking on a grace note in which Cassie’s master plan is revealed—posthumously, following an excruciating scene in which she is suffocated to death—to be nothing more than calling the police to ensure justice gets duly meted out against a cabal of rapists. Was this literal Cop-Out evidence of obliviousness, expediency, or an act of truly genuinely galaxy-brained satire? The subject and target of the joke was unclear; that Fennell won an Oscar for screenwriting serves nicely as a punch line.
The success of Promising Young Woman was such that Fennell found herself working with something like a blank check. Accordingly, her sophomore feature, Saltburn, unfolded as a caustic yet exultant cautionary tale about the dangers—and pleasures—of levelling up. “There has to be an element of revulsion,” Fennell told Vanity Fair in an attempt to contextualize the film’s nastiness, most of it festering in the character of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), whose name combines Dickensian pity with a trickster’s swift-wittedness. Imagine a Tom Ripley who listens to “Mr. Brightside” rather than “My Funny Valentine,” and you’re within spitting distance of Fennell’s booksmart Oxfordian antihero. His attempts at social climbing are given a boost by one Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a literal big man on campus at 6-foot-4, yet willing to humble himself in Oliver’s company.
The question of what Felix sees in Oliver—be it whipping boy, pliable sidekick, or kindred spirit—is left open for much of Saltburn, like a wound; the reverse perspective, meanwhile, is painfully obvious. Every time Oliver gazes at his lanky, handsome classmate, it’s longingly and lovingly, as a not-so-obscure object of desire, the same way Matt Damon gazed at Jude Law. One man’s bromance is another’s fatal attraction, and Felix’s invitation to Oliver to spend the summer at sprawling, dilapidated Saltburn manor with his family—pedigreed, incestuous monsters all, especially Mom Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), with her casual put-downs and disingenuous stories of hanging out with Jarvis Cocker in the ’90s—feels death-tinged from the start. The film is a stronger piece of direction than its predecessor; Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren cultivate a real sense of rot, and spend most of the film’s running time luxuriating in acts of high-end misanthropy. The problem is that, as both a Patricia Highsmith–style tale spinner and a wannabe Wildean social critic, Fennell is working with a croquet mallet instead of a scalpel: She bonks rather than skewers. There’s something aspirational and self-congratulatory about the film’s nastiness, a cheeky pride borne out by Keoghan’s stark-naked, victory-lapping vamp to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.” It’s a funny scene that hits its marks without transcending them, very much a case of “we have Beau Travail at home.”
With apologies to Keoghan’s effectively creepy star turn, Elordi is the best thing about Saltburn. He’s a beautiful, vacant scapegoat for the conjoined innocence and ignorance of the silver-spoon set; the lights are on behind those eyes, but nobody’s home. He’s magnetic enough as Felix that he became Fennell’s inspiration for making Wuthering Heights in the first place; the story goes that while making Saltburn, she realized her star looked “exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff” on the copy of the book she’d read at age 14, and she began writing her adaptation shortly thereafter.
What he doesn’t look like is a “dark-skinned gipsy,” and the selectively colorblind casting of Fennell’s film, which features Hong Chau as Cathy’s live-in servant Nelly and Shazad Latif as Cathy’s husband Edgar, is just one of its potentially vexing aspects. For a more fulsome inventory of the various narrative, historical, and tonal liberties being taken with the material, there are plenty of helpful book-versus-movie explainers. Suffice it to say that for all her usual edgelordish rhetoric—“I always want people to have permission to go too far, to do something that’s in bad taste, that’s not subtle”—Wuthering Heights is rather timid, swapping out incest, attempted child murder, and necrophilia for relatively vanilla BDSM kink and overdetermined dick jokes. What does it say that the film’s best gag is its first, overlaying sounds of grunting and panting on a dark screen only to reveal that the unseen heavy breather is being hung from the gallows instead of getting off; the crowd shown collectively getting off on the spectacle of his involuntary, post-mortem erection are either Fennell’s idea of the proverbial hoi polloi or a hint about how she sees her audience.
Such cynicism wouldn’t matter, or could possibly be in good fun, if Wuthering Heights had the sweep or conviction of a great melodrama, or even the base manipulative power of a bad one. Fennell, though, is up to something else: naughty, frictionless spectacle under the sign of Yorgos Lanthimos. The set design and cinematography are clearly Poor Things–coded, with some precious bodily fluids splattered for good measure; aesthetically speaking, she’s trying to be the director with the most cake and smear it, too. The most compelling element of the story has always been Heathcliff’s aching oscillation between sympathetic disempowerment and outright villainy after earning a fortune far from his adopted family home; this arc is undermined, though, by Fennell’s expedient evacuation of anything like visible racial difference in Heathcliff’s appearance, and also her glancing, obligatory treatment of class (supposedly her strong suit). Indeed, the film is in such a hurry to get to what it seems to think is the good stuff—the scenes of Cathy and Heathcliff, reunited after years apart, getting hot and heavy on the moors, despite the fact that she’s married to another man—that it botches the pace and tone of the material. The surpassing feeling in Wuthering Heights is that of a tragically fragmenting solidarity, of damaged, desperate people rationalizing the circumstances of their separation and living (in one case not too long) to regret it. The story is driven by Cathy and Heathcliff’s shared belief that they are two halves of a broken whole (“whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”) and, crucially, the tenderness of that idea gives way to demonic cruelty. Fennell unites them in a different way, however—not as soulmates, but ciphers: a proto-pick-me-girl and her simp. What does it say that both here and in Frankenstein, Elordi has been cast—and given pretty decent performances—as a thoroughly domesticated literary monster? Because Fennell eliminates most of the second half of the novel, Heathcliff never breaks bad; his conquest of love-starved Isabella (Alison Oliver), carried out under Cathy’s turned-up nose (and before the revelation of her pregnancy by Edgar) is played for a silly slapstick eroticism, almost but not quite redeemed by Oliver’s gamely self-abasing performance. (She was good in Saltburn too; if Fennell’s direction has a wavelength, Oliver is surely on it.)
There’s a difference between characters who believably exist in thrall to their urges and ones whose inner lives feel fortuitous in the face of contrivance. Robbie and Elordi are beautiful camera subjects and capable movie stars, but may as well be Masterpiece Theatre action figures (or Barbie dolls) given how clumsily they’re wielded here.
“I have not broken your heart,” sighs Heathcliff during one sweaty, tear-streaked moment of truth with Cathy, “you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” That’s a great line, and Fennell is smart enough to retain it, and many others; brave, too, considering the inevitable and palpable clash between her dialogue and Brontë’s. The hearts most likely to be broken by Wuthering Heights are those set, however sincerely (or foolishly) on the prospect of a faithful cinematic translation; of a classic. For viewers at the skeptical end of the spectrum about Fennell’s filmmaking to date, the dubious choices on display may play less like disappointment than a grueling but finally gratifying kind of validation: It’s “very enjoyable.”
Adam Nayman
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.