Director – Emerald Fennell – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 136m
***1/2
NSFW
Emily Brontë’s beloved fantasy romance gets a modern makeover with lashings of sex including some S&M – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th
The late eighteenth century. A man is publicly hanged in a town square, with crowds in attendance. Among the onlookers, in a scene unlike anything else that follows it in terms of its scale (a cast of hundreds of if not thousands) is young urchin Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), relishing the spectacle alongside the other kids present.
Cathy lives with her father (Martin Clunes) and servants including young servant / companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen) in the family home Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire Moors exposed to its treacherous weather of near constant rain, fog or snow. One night, father returns from the pub with a young boy he has rescued from being thrown out on the street by another customer. With the boy hiding in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Cathy goes to look for him only to be unexpectedly dragged under the bed in a moment invoking any number of horror movies. Under the bed, in the dark, she meets the boy (Owen Cooper). She names him Heathcliff, and although her father designates him as the girl’s pet, the two children become close like brother and sister. Her father beats the boy, which only serves to bring the two children closer. Nelly helps protect the children from Mr. Earnshaw.
The pair are equally inseparable as grown-ups (Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi), spending much of their time together out on the moors or sheltering from the inclement weather. Nelly (Hong Chau) has now become a curious mixture of servant and confidante. Jacob Elordi is a suitably brooding Heathcliff, and the only major character to affect a Yorkshire accent.
Cathy learns that they have new neighbours at the house in the nearby valley below, and determines to go and meets them. Thrushcross Grange, the house of Edgar (Shazad Latif and his sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) is lavish; they are clearly not short of money. She ends up staying there several weeks and Edgar becomes besotted with her. When Edgar asks her to marry him, she accepts. She confides in Nelly afterwards that she fears she may have done the wrong thing. It’s Heathcliff that she loves, but he has no prospects. After overhearing this exchange, Heathcliff disappears from the house.
Nelly accompanies Cathy from Wuthering Heights to work in her new home.
Cathy’s marriage to Edgar is far from happy, indeed, it is more like a prison, with a stifling routine, including predictable, repetitive bedroom sex. Cathy eventually becomes pregnant with Edgar’s child. One day she is out walking and runs into Heathcliff, now extremely well-heeled after making a success of himself in the world. Edgar agrees to invite Heathcliff into their home, and Cathy and Heathcliff embark on a torrid affair, engaging in sex at every available opportunity until the suspicious Edgar asks him to leave. Cathy confides in Nellie that she has lost the child, and later becomes extremely ill, unable or perhaps refusing to get out of bed…
The above gives a basic outline of the plot, as distilled down from Emily Brontë’s novel – gone among other things are the double flashback structure of the Heights’ new owner meeting Nelly and Nelly relating to him the history of those who have lived their in her time, gone too is the end section about the next generation down. After that, certain characters are taken out to simplify the plot in a way that you wish had been done with the director’s earlier, convoluted Saltburn (2023).
The promise of the opening hanging scene, complete with a disapproving nun, bleak religious slogans and a Punch & Judy show afterwards, echoes the terrifying burlesque of Judy & Punch (Mirrah Foulkes, 2019), yet the rest of the production never quite goes there. Mellington and Cooper, the two kids portraying the two leads for the opening minutes, are terrific. She attempts to teach him to read; he gets discouraged and bails out. (Heathcliff’s illiteracy will come back to bite him later on.)
The grown-up Cathy’s friendship with Heathcliff slowly turns into romantic fixation. While this is going on, Martin Clunes is perfectly cast as the father (he combines both the father and the elder brother of the book) who is sometimes drunk, sometimes angry and will eventually ruin the family through gambling. Hong Chau is superb playing a character who is sometimes helpful and sometimes up to something, always playing her cards close to her chest. (In the book, the differently spelled Nellie is a narrator who may not be telling the whole truth all of the time.)
The much more lively and trashy second half kicks off when Cathy first visits Thrushcross Grange. Following a delicious scene in which Isabella delivers a convoluted yet heartfelt analysis of Romeo and Juliet to a clearly bored Edgar, she is startled by the appearance of monstrous hands atop the garden wall. These turn out to be Cathy’s.
It’s not long before she’s making the journey to his house on foot in her wedding dress, looking like a wraith.
When Cathy and Edgar marry, he gives the house a makeover in her honour; she is given a bedroom with flesh-coloured walls bearing details like veins and moles. It could almost be something out of a David Cronenberg movie, and yet in a way it’s nothing like that. The other rooms in the house are equally distinctive, if not quite as extreme. All this, and equally affecting costumes to match (although there’s no attempt at a flesh suit) convey the feeling not of the naturalism you might expect, but rather of otherworldly fantasy. Clever editing of their life together shows a repetitive and soulless routine, including soulless sex where she is putting up with rather than enjoying it.
From this point on, Robbie’s performance suddenly bursts into life, as she finally gets to play with the duplicitous and scheming side of this that her character seems to lack in the early part of the narrative.
There’s precious little of the clichéd scene of Cathy running over the moors to embrace Heathcliff (one was shot, and appears briefly in a flashback montage near the end): instead, following her father’s funeral which plays out like a black wedding between the two lovers, we are shown a parade of (mostly) fully clothed, but otherwise full on, sex scenes cut together to imply that their illicit life together, minus the boring bits when nothing happens (which aren’t in the film), is one long, pleasurable, breathless shagfest in a multiplicity of locations. Of course, this can’t last, and eventually Edgar shuts it down (although it’s never clear how little or how much he knows).
Isabella is touted as the doll maker for a gigantic doll’s house in which the handmade occupants and their activities mirror or parody those of the real life Thrushcross Grange, even down to one of them getting stabbed in the back with a knife. Stranger still is to come when Heathcliff, on the rebound from Cathy, initiates a brutal, loveless, sexual domination of her which ends not only in marriage and the pair of them living back at his old home of Wuthering Heights, but also playing S&M games in which he is the master and she the wilfully obedient dog. This in turn echoes a much earlier scene at Wuthering Heights in which Cathy, from a hayloft above, witnesses a servant Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) tightens a bridle around the head of the maid Zillah (Amy Morgan) before they indulge themselves further.
As for the weather, despite Cathy’s claim to Heathcliff that she can see a small patch of blue sky so everything will be alright, most of the narrative on the moors takes place in mist and fog, heavy rain or snow. I suppose it’s heightened for dramatic effect, because anyone who knows that part of the world will tell you, while there certainly grim times or days like these, there are equal amounts of gloriously good weather.
Aside from its bravura opening childhood scenes, I found this pretty hard going up to the point where Cathy meets Edgar. After they marry, all hell breaks loose as it turns into a memorable slice of high production value, trash cinema – not really something you’d expect from a major Hollywood distributor since such offerings tend to emanate more from the fringes of film culture than the mainstream. A bunch of specially composed Charlie XCX songs play at various points throughout, compounding this approach. Admittedly the source novel is a dark and seriously twisted Gothic romance, although how mainstream audiences expecting a solid adaptation or diehard fans of the novel will respond is anyone’s guess.
Wuthering Heights is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 6th.
Trailer: