Wuthering Heights, the third feature film from Emerald Fennell, plays more like an $80M music video than a steamy, doomed romance between two yearning lovers. Her style is maximalist and her tone is all over the place. The film is beautifully photographed by Linus Sandgren, with luxurious sets and impressive production design — all elements that should work for an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, but are ultimately let down by its two leads, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
Two of Hollywood’s biggest stars playing swooning lovers should, on paper, be a knockout. Who wouldn’t want to see them both give sexually charged performances? They’ve each emerged from roles that highlight their considerable screen magnetism. But sitting through Wuthering Heights, I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly miscast they are. Robbie puts in a good effort playing a spoiled, yearning young woman who wants only what she can see and touch, but not for one moment did I believe Elordi as the brutish, aggressive heartthrob Heathcliff.
Fennell’s taste and style feel well-suited to classic Gothic horror. Her eye has never been in question. I enjoyed how Cathy’s home plays like Dracula’s castle and the Linton home is like a Tumblr girl’s fantasy. The anachronistic music and costuming are fun choices we’ve seen work elsewhere — Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette being the obvious touchstone. But where Marie Antoinette soars, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights falters.
While Robbie seems up to the task of playing a young woman in her early twenties, Elordi cannot match her commitment. His Heathcliff is sleepy and dull — except for the stretch after his five-year absence, when he returns to find Cathy married to Edgar Linton and gets to lean into his “effortlessly cool” persona, hoop earring and all. The moment that artifice slips, however, so does his performance. It feels shallow, held together largely by our collective desire to simply look at Jacob Elordi.
The two actors most fully “in the pocket” are Alison Oliver as Isabella and Martin Clunes as Mr. Earnshaw. Oliver brings a psychotic, horned-up energy that fits Fennell’s style better than anyone else in the cast — going on about ribbons, trembling in Elordi’s presence. She’s the comic relief, but also the only character I wanted to spend more time with. The small moments we get between the two of them in the third act are some of the film’s most entertaining: she writes his letters for him, she wears a dog collar, she barks. It’s maximalist, extreme, and over the top — but befitting of the film Fennell seems to be reaching for, and it works.
Clunes’s Mr. Earnshaw is equally winning. His stiff upper lip, slowly curdling into something more sinister, is juicy and well-acted. Fennell is clearly in her element here, and Clunes’s scenes are among the most straightforwardly enjoyable in the film. It’s a shame to see strong supporting work stranded on the fringes of such a messy whole.
Is there any subtlety to her filmmaking? Not particularly. Does Fennell love using food and fluids as sexual metaphors? Absolutely. But most of it doesn’t land. Early on, Cathy pranks Heathcliff by hiding eggs beneath his blanket for him to crush — ruining his clean linens. The callback, when Cathy herself sits on eggs that only Heathcliff could have planted, is genuinely good cinema: visual storytelling that lets the audience piece things together on their own. But that’s about as much of the food symbolism I can get behind. The dead fish, the pig blood, the wallpaper printed to resemble Margot Robbie’s skin all bounce off me like a bricked shot. I appreciate the audacity; it just rings false.
If there’s a lesson in Wuthering Heights, it’s this: sometimes it’s better not to cast the obvious A-list duo and instead search for actors who can actually inhabit these characters. Maybe one day, given the right script, Fennell will make a great film. But until she learns to get out of her own way — to push past the surface-level provocation that has become her signature — she risks making the same mistakes over and over again.
