Review: 'Wuthering Heights,' a vapid portrait of trauma bonding

For “Wuthering Heights,” it seems as if Emerald Fennell got inspired by the vertical micro-dramas you see on your Facebook feed: broad, loud, in-your-face performances. Except those vertical shorts are better.

It is unfair to compare Fennell's movie to Emily Brontë’s novel, as with any film adaptation of a book, since they are two completely different mediums. A filmmaker, as an artist, is not a photocopier.

So Fennell’s neo-Gothic reinterpretation of the Victorian classic novel, packed with anachronistic styling, is melodramatic, garish, and spectacularly boring. For two hours and 16 minutes, I sat there wondering if the crowd watching the Anne Curtis and Jericho Rosales love story in the cinema next door were having a better time.

Borrowing Brontë’s romantic tragedy, “Wuthering Heights” takes us to a Game of Thrones-like place but low-budget and overly stagey. The estate, as we all know, is called Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse-style manor on the Yorkshire moors and the Earnshaw family home.

One day, the father (Martin Clunes), a drunk domestic despot, comes home with a dirty, ragged stray boy (Adolescence's Owen Cooper) and gives him to his small daughter Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) as a “pet.”

Cathy gives her new pet a name — Heathcliff — and they become close, until these two best buddies on the moors eventually grow up to be Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

So, Heathcliff and Cathy, as adults, form a trauma bond. She marries into wealth, to a rich, boring dude, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and moves into his gaudy Thrushcross Grange, where Edgar’s woman-child sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) also lives.

Heathcliff, now rich, eventually becomes Cathy’s side piece, and we are subjected to their dull illicit sexual affair. And you keep wondering: where the hell is Edgar? Is he blind? Is he deaf? That the low-key villain Nelly (Hong Chau) has to spell it out for him?

Elordi and Robbie’s lack of chemistry is compounded by bizarre, abrupt scene transitions, random shots of ugly dolls, choppy editing, and histrionic acting.

And Fennell brings to life those classic mass-market pocketbooks with sensual covers: windswept heroine, half-dressed brooding man, bodice slipping, stormy sky. She also uses gratuitous close-ups, with the camera pushing into the actors’ lips, tongues, or scars, that add no meaning or feeling.

Stylistically and narratively messy, with cringe dialogue, it does feel — as Fennell herself said — inspired by her 14-year-old self’s exposure to the book. It is a juvenile softcore romantic fantasy. A lurid historical pseudo-erotica. A performative piece of glossy sexual pantomime — and a vapid portrait of trauma bonding. Half a star for the opening music by Charli XCX and Cathy’s massive blood-loss scene.

0.5 out of 5 stars.

Now showing in cinemas.