Emerald Fennell manages to achieve some new and striking things with her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s most famous novel. However, it’s an odd irony that in trying to be stirring and daring, WUTHERING HEIGHTS ends up rather blunted and safe.

In the lead-up to the film’s release, much has been made of the title’s stylised presentation using quote marks, to indicate this is very much Fennell’s vision or interpretation. Her focus is the all-consuming passion displayed between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), a young boy with whom she develops a deep bond when he is brought home by her alcoholic father (Martin Clunes).

Fennell’s aesthetics are bold, even more so than they were in PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN. The manner in which the Wuthering Heights residence is rendered is disquieting: we see a decaying English home set amidst rock formations that wouldn’t be out of place in some sort of German Expressionist nightmare. As the film progresses, the use of colour becomes more overt, and whilst bold, it starts to become distracting. While the visuals become more simplistic this way, it’s really the story and characters that end up simplistically rendered in crayon.

“While the visuals become more simplistic [as the film progresses], it’s really the story and characters that end up simplistically rendered in crayon.”

Cathy and Heathcliff’s love and passion here is not only formed in adolescence, but presented through an adolescent lens. Fennell has indicated this is a deliberate choice, evoking teenage emotional reaction to the core relationship. There are attempts to bring a sensory edge to this, but they are empty provocations in the manner of the faux-edginess of SALTBURN. These flourishes – bedsheets squelching with broken eggs, voyeuristic viewing of a kink-laden sexual interlude, a clichéd pan across a face mid-masturbation – provide no depth to the delirium that eventually grips the doomed pair. Given the differing timbre of the films, it seems unfair to compare WUTHERING HEIGHTS to the likes of Celine Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE. However, such comparisons against romantic touchstones in contemporary cinema lay bare how far this adaptation is from not only its own source material, but the depth of passion that can be conveyed in a restrained period setting.

“Elordi and Robbie are compelling screen presences, [but] the script never gives them anything with the scope to transcend a rather asinine portrait of desire.”

Elordi and Robbie are compelling screen presences, and there is good on-screen chemistry between the pair, but the script never gives them anything with the scope to transcend a rather asinine portrait of desire. Fennell frequently relies on the score of Anthony Willis to stir emotion where her script cannot, and the original songs of Charli XCX feel like a forced reach to bolster pop-cultural credentials.

In fact, Elordi has demonstrated the pathos he can generate with limited dialogue in an adaptation of Gothic literature in FRANKENSTEIN, but there he was backed up by Guillermo Del Toro’s cinematic and thematic vision. When seen in such proximity, the failures of Fennell’s particular adaptation of Gothic-influenced literature are especially clear. When it fails to elicit emotion at the same level as the much more grounded and restrained 2011 adaptation by Andrea Arnold (which also leans into the racial underpinnings of Heathcliff’s status, something Fennell omits entirely), it clarifies the failure on its own terms. Contemporary cinema is replete with Gothic, Romantic, romantic, and eroticised film, but Fennell’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS doesn’t grasp the windswept nettle of those genres nor plant its own visionary seeds.

Fennell’s interpretation invites viewers to witness passion and to feel souls strain against their bonds, but the result is a more emptily performative expression of immature lust, like two fumbling teenagers who should just get a room.