Emerald Fennell, director of the new Wuthering Heights film, promised an avant-garde psychosexual reimagining of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. She instead delivers a bizarre exercise in vanity which misunderstands its own themes.

The destructive bond between the tortured orphan Heathcliff and the privileged Catherine Earnshaw has been a fecund wellspring for the cinema screen since its publication in 1847. Brontë astonished her refined Victorian readers with her unabashed portrayal of social class, race and familial abuse against the backdrop of the ghostly Yorkshire moorlands. No room is left for any of these concerns in this liberal adaptation which squanders its two-hour runtime to hollow displays of lukewarm sexual transgression. 

Fennell’s filmography is devoted to shock and awe theory. Saltburn, the second film in the Emerald-verse, also banks on being provocative and visually attractive so it can stun and overwhelm its audience to distract from its purposelessness. In Wuthering Heights, the same strategy reduces the central tragedy of Cathy and Heathcliff’s story to something resembling a Colleen Hoover novel. The plot hinges entirely on an unmoving miscommunication trope - one that is conveniently resolved, zapping any emotional investment for viewers.

The refusal to touch the racial politics of the gothic source material haunts the film from start to finish. The choice to cast Jacob Elordi as the ‘dark-skinned gipsy’, Heathcliff, was ostensibly made based on his success as on-screen eye candy. Last year, Fennell sheepishly admitted at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, that she favoured Elordi because he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that [she] read,” when she was fourteen. It is evident that the film-maker’s white-washed teenage vision was prioritised above all else. No thought was given to the moral implications of erasing a major opportunity for an Asian or Roma actor, especially since the latter are virtually invisible in Hollywood. By cutting out the racial torment which hardens Heathcliff into a roguish villain, he does not seem any more mistreated than the other residents in Wuthering Heights. The revenge he wreaks on the high-born Lintons and Earnshaws in the third act then seems comically unwarranted.

The optics are troubling. The desultory ‘colour-blind’ casting, places two Asian actors, Hong Chau as Nelly Dean and Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, as obstacles which keep its young, white, photogenic couple apart. Nelly, especially, is rewritten as an arch-manipulator, with the suggestion that she bears responsibility for Cathy’s death. The diversification of the film’s secondary characters was a disingenuous choice, only done in the hope that it would offset the criticism surrounding Elordi’s casting. That visual significance was completely overlooked.

Cathy’s casting, which has been much less heatedly discussed, also suffers from the director’s aesthetic myopia. Margot Robbie, who also produced the film, plays a child trapped in a thirty-five year old’s body. She reproduces the same whining tantrums and pouty sulks written in the novel, but the twenty-year age-gap between Brontë’s adolescent Cathy and Robbie’s middle aged heroine makes for an unnatural and uncomfortable performance. 

There were times when the film was on the cusp of forming some kind of commentary. Alison Oliver’s Isabella, an infantilised and cosseted simpleton, verges on a criticism of protective paternalism. Her sheltered upbringing leaves her unprepared for her husband’s cruelty. Yet, Fennell abandons all of this to pursue the idea that Isabella is in fact an S&M enthusiast. 

Shock is mistaken for daring in this adaptation. Fennell’s incessant attempts to scandalise undermines her claim to a radical reinvention of Wuthering Heights. Muddled and self-indulgent, the film proves too childish to finish what Emily Brontë began.