After many months of the public yearning for it, the new “Wuthering Heights” adaptation has finally arrived. But whether our collective desire has been sated is up for (a lot of) debate. I chatted with the film critic Justin Chang—who reviewed the movie, and found it lush but lacking—about whether the director Emerald Fennell succeeded in giving the people what they want.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The discourse is intense with this one. Do you think that was inevitable, considering the hype that surrounded its release?
I’d say the hype and the discourse began in July, 2024, when the movie was first announced. Fennell is a polarizing filmmaker, with a self-consciously provocative streak. So her decision to tackle a beloved, much-adapted classic generated predictable outrage from the start—and not just any classic but “Wuthering Heights,” which is its own dark, contentious beast of a novel.
“Underneath Fennell’s brazen streak,” you write, “is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve.” Tell me more about that?
I think it’s the flip side of her audacity. She throws a lot at the screen here—a lot of skin, a lot of décor, a lot of boldly anachronistic touches. For all that, it’s a thuddingly one-note movie, and one note is hard to sustain for two-plus hours. She’s trying to hit at least two notes—on some level, I think she wants us to laugh at the torrid nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance and feel deeply moved by it—but she just doesn’t get there.
This adaptation was—and I think you might agree—the most sumptuous I’ve seen, even if it’s also the most superficial. Would you say it is also the sexiest?
I’m not convinced the movie is as sexy as it wants to be. Fennell plainly wants to turn us on, but how much erotic mileage does she really get out of all those closeups of oozy egg yolks? It all reminded me of something my colleague Anthony Lane wrote years ago, in a review of “Chicago”: “Is there anything, in art or in life, less sexy than the incorrigible, twenty-four-hour desire to trumpet one’s sexiness to the world?”
Having the main characters—played by Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie—be sexually intimate isn’t the only way Fennell strayed from the original text. How do you feel about the liberties she took?
Some of her liberties are nothing new. Like many “Wuthering Heights” adaptations, this one ignores the novel’s second half. The elaborate framing devices are gone, too; Emily Brontë’s book is, among other things, a story about storytelling, and Fennell’s film is not. My issue isn’t with the liberties themselves—every good adaptation takes its share of them. It’s more that Fennell pares away so much of Brontë’s great narrative material and, the glossy maximalism of her approach aside, I don’t think she gives us much in return.
Elordi is a bit of a Fennell muse, it would seem. Heathcliff is nothing like the aloof rich boy he played in her film “Saltburn,” but, as you point out, there are comparisons to be made. What do these suggest about her body of work, do you think?
Well, she clearly has an eye for palatial real estate—and, more important, for good actors. I really disliked “Saltburn,” but Elordi was terrific in it. He isn’t a Heathcliff for the ages, but he does just fine.
Fennell likes to riff on well-known texts and genres, and to adopt something of a pseudo-subversive posture toward them. Her “Promising Young Woman” was a candy-colored take on exploitation movies, especially rape-revenge thrillers. “Saltburn” was an empty-calorie mashup of “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” With this one, she’s basically saying: This isn’t your great-great-great-grandmother’s “Wuthering Heights.” This is a “Wuthering Heights” that fucks.
Read Justin’s Review
