DUBAI: Nearly two centuries after Emily Bronte wrote “Wuthering Heights” — a book so savage, so dark, so ‘unfeminine’ that early readers were convinced it was written by a man — filmmaker Emerald Fennell has boldly set out to adapt it for the big screen by all but ignoring the book in its entirety.
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So we have swirling mist, heaving bosoms and slow-motion, close-up yearning. But we have almost nothing of Bronte’s elemental novel and its explorations of class inequality, generational trauma and the supernatural. Fennell’s highly-stylized, steamy fever dream seems more invested in aestheticized longing than in the brutal examination of deeper themes.
The film begins with a public hanging, witnessed by young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlottle Mellington as this, young, Cathy, with Margot Robbie playing the older version) and her friend Nellie Dean. Both of them are shortly afterwards introduced to a poor boy picked off the streets of Liverpool by Cathy’s wealthy father. He offers the boy to his capricious daughter as “a pet.” She names him Heathcliff (“Adolescence” breakout star Owen Cooper as a boy, and Jacob Elordi as an adult) and they’re instantly joined at the hip.
