Heading into Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell was one of the most promising young women I could think of behind the camera. Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were both top 10 films in their respective years for me, if memory serves me correctly. Yes, I was one of the few, the bold, who actually enjoyed the audacity of Saltburn.
Fennell also has a terrific ear for music, and one of the best things about Wuthering Heights is the original soundtrack from Charli XCX. It’s the kind of thing that years ago would have been a bigger talking point, but no one really seems to pay attention to film soundtracks anymore unless they are already being told to. Sadly, Charli’s work here may not get a single award nomination by the end of the year, because I suspect there will be enough critics like me who didn’t like Wuthering Heights to keep the film from being an overall priority. That’s unfortunate, because the soundtrack is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Oddly, last year also brought me a third film from another promising new favorite director of mine, Edward Berger. His Ballad Of A Small Player was a mess, even though All Quiet On The Western Front was my favorite film of 2022, and Conclave was in my top five of 2024. What is happening with my favorite directors and their third films?
Wuthering Heights is clearly something Fennell loved at one point, likely during her teen years, but she has a tough time proving that through this adaptation. She only adapts about half the book, and because of the choices she makes, she ends the film in a way that makes a Part 2 basically impossible. So, what if this had been a hit? Shouldn’t Fennell have been just a tad more faithful, if only so she could have had the pleasure of eventually adapting the totality of one of her favorite books?
It reminds me of the nonsense we got when they decided, in their INFINITE WISDOM, to split the final Divergent novel into two films and then never actually film the second half. Everyone realizes that if they had just stuck to the plan, we would have had a Divergent trilogy with an actual ending, right? I’m a fan of the books, not the films, but it is infuriating nonetheless.
With Wuthering Heights, I know major changes have been made. I’m not enough of a fan of the book to break down every single one of them, but they all have a significant impact on the story. This becomes a more easily digestible product, but it also loses a lot of Emily Brontë’s original intent. There are thematic elements missing here, and if Fennell had matched or replaced them with something just as compelling, I could understand the decision. Honestly, I don’t think she does.
There are things here that Fennell seems to be trying to flip and make sexier, because she wants this complicated relationship between Robbie and Elordi, instead of leaning harder into the aspects of these characters that make them so problematic in the first place. The book also strongly suggests Heathcliff is not white, with references that were Brontë’s way of suggesting he was a fish out of water in more ways than one. Fennell seems to trade much of that subtext for the promise of a steamy and complicated romance.
The problem is that the romance is between two actors with very average chemistry. It isn’t that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi repel each other. They don’t. It’s just that both of them have had better screen partners before, and this material needed something more intense than what they have together here.
There’s a boldness in Fennell’s choices in Promising Young Woman and Saltburn that made Wuthering Heights seem like it could be the perfect project for her. She seems to understand complex and impossible leading characters, which should have made Heathcliff an ideal fit. Instead, she softens him quite a bit, and that choice benefits from the fact that we don’t see the second half of the book either.
Adaptations are tough. I tend to look at modern literature being adapted and draw a much harsher line when it comes to changing or veering too much from the source text, because we’re often still in the first or second adaptation of those books. With older books, there’s more room to play. By all means, explore and reinvent A Christmas Carol. There are enough faithful adaptations out there.
But with Wuthering Heights, Fennell seems lost in terms of how far she can stray from the material versus what she should keep. She ends up losing a lot of the subtext and intent that Emily Brontë had in her work, and sadly, she doesn’t replace it with the same verve and vigor as her previous films.
Audiences should have left Wuthering Heights bothered, hot and bothered, or at the very least ready to debate the wild choices Fennell made. Instead, this felt too safe. It ended up being too dull for my taste, and while the performances aren’t necessarily bad, they also aren’t memorable.
My favorite thing about the film was the banging soundtrack by Charli XCX, who seems to have written as if her music would be attached to Saltburn Presents Wuthering Heights. Sadly, that’s not what this is.
On the plus side, this adaptation of a classic stuffy old book made far more money because of all the hype around it than a normal adaptation probably would have. So, points at least for exposing audiences to a CliffsNotes version of Emily Brontë. This does have audio description, which did a nice job of filling out the costumes of the time, and I thought set the tone nicely from the shocking beginning I’m not sure the film ever matched after, but still the audio description made sure it went there.
If you were hoping this promising young director would bring some Saltburn to an Emily Brontë classic, she didn’t. Charlie XCX’s banging soundtrack certainly thought she might, but this wasn’t up to my expectations of Emerald Fennell and her capabilities.
Rotten: 5.8/10
