Wuthering lows

“This is enough now,” a character declares, two hours into writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights. “I will not stand for this grotesque performance!” Well, you said it.

Fennell was behind 2023’s slaughter-of-the-Sloanes black comedy Saltburn, a film that delighted in shocking its audience with the grotesque, and from the opening titles of her new work, we’re reminded this is her chief trick. What’s that sound we can hear, of wood creaking while a man groans? Is it, we wonder, someone DOING IT? In fact, it’s a hanging, but fear not, fans of being shocked, the man on the gallows has a massive stiffy! This is Emily Brontë reinterpreted by Lord Flashheart.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Cathy and her adopted brother Heathcliff. Cathy is unwilling to be Mrs Heathcliff in poverty, and so marries the fabulously wealthy Edgar. He is devoted to her, but she pines for Heathcliff, and spends her days and nights sulking. When the object of her affection returns, having made his fortune, they begin shagging at every opportunity. Is this going to end well? Do you care?

While we’re trudging slowly through this, every 15 minutes we have to be reminded that Fennell is terribly, terribly, terribly shocking. I haven’t read the book, and I’ve no idea whether Fennell has, but I’m going to venture onto a limb here and suggest that the bondage scenes are her invention. Does the original feature Cathy pleasuring herself on the Yorkshire Moors? Again, I’m guessing not.

Reinterpreting classic works for a modern audience is a good thing. And some of it works: the soundtrack, by Charli XCX, is great. It’s just that I’m assuming a book that is regularly listed as one of the greatest ever written has some subtlety, whereas Fennell belongs to the school of “subtext is for cowards”. When Cathy’s dissolute father – played by Martin Clunes having the time of his life – dies of drink, we see him in a room piled to the ceiling with empty bottles. Cathy, trying to cheer herself up, wears actual rose-tinted glasses. If Fennell is ever allowed near Pride And Prejudice, we will get to hear Mr Darcy telling Elizabeth “how ardently I admire and want to bang you”.

I wonder too what modern audiences will make of this pair of doomed lovers. Cathy is manipulative and Heathcliff is an abuser. Are we supposed to be hoping they get together? To pull that off, you have to take your audience into the mind of a woman in the 19th Century writing about characters in the 18th Century. But this film doesn’t do that work. Instead, it takes the shortcut of having Cathy and Heathcliff as the only people in the film who are allowed to be beautiful. Edgar is a chinless wonder. Alison Oliver, as his ward Isabella, is made to seem unappealing and stupid, so that we won’t feel too much pity when Heathcliff mistreats her.

It’s all very stylish, and the set designers clearly had a whale of a time: Cathy’s home looks like something out of Warhammer 40,000, while Edgar’s mansion has been built out of left-over sets from 1980s pop videos. But it’s style without depth, asking you to believe that true love means dying beautifully. And that being shocking is big and clever.