Wuthering Heights movie review: Margot Robbie film is a fevered, astonishing and infuriating mess

It’s a declaration that this is not a straight adaptation of the classic novel, so don’t lay charges against it of being unfaithful to the original text.

No, Cathy is not a teenager. No, Heathcliff is not “dark-skinned”. No, this is not a grim exploration of generational abuse and trauma.

That’s not Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and the sooner you realise that this movie can only considered as its own thing, the more you’ll free yourself to see it as it is, not what Charlotte Bronte intended.

Having said that, even uncoupled from Bronte’s legacy, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a bewildering mess.

There are moments and aspects that are transcendent, so breathtakingly magnificent, you almost want to cry from how beautiful, for example, a particular mise-en-scene is. Other times, you’re so exhausted by the maximalism of certain elements, you become so impatient for the film to end – and that’s when it feels like it never will.

Wuthering Heights has been billed as a sweeping gothic romance, and on that count, it’s true to that raison d’etre. Bronte’s novel might be famed for the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff forever locked together in their pain, but it wasn’t actually heavy on the swooning.

This film is brimming with desire and yearning, which is actually manifested several times. If you’re looking for horny, Wuthering Heights will deliver that fever, and Fennell is excellent with vivid, evocative imagery. You’ll never look at a raw egg the same way again.

Fennell’s iconoclasm, her willingness to tear down and remake conventions is what makes her such an interesting filmmaker. Her vision as interpreted through her collaborators it’s what’s responsible for Wuthering Heights’ superb production design, cinematography, costuming and some of its performances.

These are the parts that make the film at times otherworldly, as if gripped by some unknowable force that threatens to overwhelm you with how perfect those elements are.

But like Fennell’s Saltburn and, to a lesser extent depending on who you ask, Promising Young Woman, Wuthering Heights too has exalted highs but then tumbles down into a fatal crash.

First, the production and set design is astounding. There are three main settings, the almost Expressionist angular hostility of Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s family home, the untamed, ethereal Yorkshire moors, and the over-the-top artificiality of Thrushcross Grange.

The latter is a real point of notice because it’s the milieu in which Cathy is kept in great comfort and prestige, but she is like a toy inside a dollhouse encased in a snow globe.

The Eden-esque garden with its perfect lawn and lilac-silk-covered swing ropes, the fabric wallpaper designed to mimic the textures and colours of Margot Robbie’s skin, it’s all of a piece, a swirling, hypnotic piece.

The sculptural costumes too add to the overall vibes of heightened seduction, as if every moment is life or death, while Linus Sangren’s cinematography is showstopping, just consider how he frames Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff on horseback against a darkening red sky, evoking Scarlett O’Hara’s silhouette as she promised to never go hungry again (whatever the problems with Gone with the Wind, it’s not with the way it looks).

Here’s the rub. This version of the story is a grand romance, and there is boiling chemistry between Robbie and Elordi, but their Cathy and Heathcliff are so deeply unsympathetic, you don’t actually want them to get their happily ever after, in life or death.

You find yourself ungenerously tapping your fingers, willing along her inevitable demise (apologies, 179-year-old spoiler alert) so there would be some natural justice and we can be released from this pretense that this is a love story we should want to root for.

Too often, Cathy and Heathcliff provoke the thought, “OK, enough with your nonsense, you can go both jump off a bridge”. She is so immature and churlish, which was (ah, here comes the book comparisons) the case in Bronte’s tome, but that Cathy was much, much younger.

Elordi’s Heathcliff was a considerate and thoughtful young man with a protective instinct, but when he returns to Wuthering Heights after Cathy breaks his heart, he has a cruel streak that he unleashes mostly on Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver).

While Cathy and Heathcliff are established in literary canon as genuinely awful people who treat others appallingly, in Fennell’s version, they don’t really have a substantive grounding in the trauma and abuse of Bronte’s tale. Which is why they’re so unlikeable, to the point of no redemption.

It doesn’t help that Fennell has written Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) to be a kind if not clueless man, so you greatly resent the disrespect Cathy inflicts on him. She really is terrible.

Robbie is a talented actor, especially in roles that suit her penchant for playing the broader notes of a character, and her Cathy is exactly that, overt and mannered, while Elordi makes for a smouldering lead. The man knows how to serve a look.

But the two performances that really stand out, that run away with every scene they’re in are Oliver as the loopy, childlike Isabella, whose discombobulating energy at any moment steals focus from everyone around her, and Martin Clunes as the louche Mr Earnshaw, Cathy’s alcoholic and grotesque father.

Oliver and Clunes are both having so much fun, are so clearly vibing with the best parts of Fennell’s film. They got and got the memo.

The chasm between Wuthering Heights’ characters encapsulates why this film is so chaotic. Performances from Oliver and Clunes that are so undeniably magnetic, and then the central romance that ultimately leaves you cold and feeling a bit gross .

Cathy and Heathcliff may represent raw desire, but it’s not love. They are pure id and we’re all presently too tired to indulge that bullsh*t.

But what is love in Wuthering Heights is its paragon of filmmaking craft. Come for the promise of hot romance, stay for the heartstopping production design and superb cinematography. It makes the whole endeavour worthwhile.

Rating: 3/5

Wuthering Heights is in cinemas on February 12