The hate-watch event of the year is upon us—or has that sentiment proved to be misguided? Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has arrived in all of its resplendent, horned-up glory. Did Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie nail the parts? Does adaptation faithfulness matter whatsoever? Is this movie actually that sexy? The Ringer staff has thoughts.
1. What is your tweet-length review of Wuthering Heights?
Nora Princiotti: Saltburn proved it’s possible to make an empty movie work if you let Rosamund Pike have a ball and put “Murder on the Dancefloor” on the soundtrack. Wuthering Heights has neither trick to fall back on.
Julianna Ress: Kind of like if they made the Taylor Swift song about Travis Kelce’s dick into a movie.
Helena Hunt: Like if a prolific Wattpad author finally got the budget to adapt her horned-up teen fanfic … and then realized it was really embarrassing.
2. What was the best moment of the film?
Walker: Any time Jacob Elordi picked Margot Robbie up with one hand and placed her somewhere: in a tree, over his shoulder, hovering in front of him, held by her corset laces. This was not a sexy movie, as much as a movie with sex in it—but that little trick worked every time (as Margot Robbie also attested in British Vogue).
Gruttadaro: Alison Oliver immediately goes into the “Bad Movie, Great Performance” pantheon. I really wish everyone else was in the movie she was in.
Hunt: When Heathcliff looms through the mists and you realize you’re watching a parody of every bodice ripper ever made (or maybe of Twilight)—and you can finally rest easy because this movie isn’t supposed to be good, get it??
Princiotti: I got a genuine kick out of the recurring gag where Jacob Elordi has to crouch to fit through a door.
Ress: Look, I know there’s been a lot of Charli xcx lately (and according to her upcoming filmography, we’re in for a lot more) but brat overload aside, this soundtrack bangs. I was on board as soon as she called it a “sister” to her debut album True Romance—real ones know!—and those lush synths twinkling over Jacob Elordi riding a horse absolutely delivered. Plus, Charli is still the only person who can will Sky Ferreira out of retirement (if only briefly).
3. What was your least favorite part of the movie?
Princiotti: Where to begin! The unearned trauma porn, the lack of chemistry between the leads, the way it stands between being a movie that’s winking at you and one that’s got something stuck in its eye. I didn’t go into Wuthering Heights expecting it to hold together, but I didn’t think it would be such a drag.
Hunt: Hate to say it, because it’s clearly the thrust of the whole thing (sorry!), but it’s gotta be the fornication. Not to be that pearl-clutching nerd, but the point of Wuthering Heights is denial and repression—which curdles into maddening, cold-blooded revenge. With all of the fucking going on in this movie, there’s not much time for plotting and ruination—which happen to be a lot more compelling than humping under a pile of petticoats. Plus, during their pillow talk, Cathy and Heathcliff actually talk through all the misunderstandings that tore them asunder. Great lesson in working through your shit! Not so great for a doomed gothic romance.
Gruttadaro: How TF do we get two years of leaks about bodice ripping, bodily fluids, and auto-asphyxiation and then the final result is an incredibly boring, visually disastrous PG-13 melodrama? (I know it’s rated R, but that’s just because of all the egg-jizz stuff.)
Walker: If a man painted my skin, complete with moles, onto my bedroom walls, I would fling him off a moor, climb down, and grab his ghost so I could throw him off again. (I still don’t think I’d cuck him on the dining room table though, but Cathy’s built different.)
Ress: I am begging everyone to stop putting their fingers in the food.
4. What was your favorite sexually suggestive moment?
Ress: [Furiously typing and backspacing my thoughts on Jacob Elordi chopping wood.]
Gruttadaro: Probably Isabella’s Georgia O’Keeffe–inspired vagina friendship scrapbook.
Walker: I wouldn’t call the sex montage “suggestive,” so I’m going to propose that quick cut between Heathcliff’s post-floorboard boner—cut to a literal snail trail on a window, cut to hands kneading dough, complete with squelching noises, cut to 30-something Margot Robbie as a horny teenage Cathy.
Hunt: I can’t say the romping on offer is particularly sexy—maybe because any yearning/chemistry/sign of mutual attraction seems to elude Elordi and Robbie at every turn. In Wuthering Heights, sex on the moors and the floors just seems moist, psychologically damaging, and superbly sticky. So in the spirit of the goo, I’ll give props to one lovingly filmed slug and its trail of slime—presumably not unlike the substances Cathy and Heathcliff leave behind as a fond remembrance of their love.
Princiotti: Nope! I’m not going to grant you that this movie succeeded in being hot. All the heaving bosoms, moist balls of dough, face-licking and bedrooms made of pink flesh can’t compensate for the fact that this movie tries to have all its climaxes without any foreplay. Scholars of Shonda Rhimes know how much fun a 19th-century period adaptation that turns all subtext into explicit text can be, but Wuthering Heights is poor source material for this treatment because it’s a story of wounded people wounding each other in turn. No one really gets to have fun, and Cathy and Heathcliff are more trauma-bonded from childhood than they are lovers with an electric spark. All that said, I did like when he picked her up by the corset, sue me.
5. Wuthering Heights obviously isn’t, but do adaptations need to be faithful?
Gruttadaro: Generally speaking, no. It’s fine. There are faithful adaptations out there for anyone who needs one. But I do think it’s important, if you’re going to take a blowtorch to your source material, to make sure that you’re doing it for a good reason. (Not sure if you can tell by my tone, but Wuthering Heights did not succeed in this regard.)
Princiotti: Not remotely, but if you’re going to make a movie of a book that’s already been adapted many times over, I’d like a clearer case presented for why this one advances the ball.
Walker: I think they need to be fairly faithful if they’re using the original title, and already only adapting one half of the source material. I don’t think it’s entirely chill to take an abusive and controlling relationship from the book and turn it into a titillating dip into consensual pet play—unless we’re dealing with an “inspired by” situation like, say, Clueless/She’s the Man/10 Things I Hate About You. (All adaptations for teenagers, by the way, which this movie maybe should have committed to being.)
Hunt: Plenty of superficial changes are probably necessary when moving a novel as dense as Wuthering Heights to the screen: cutting out some characters, combining others, creating a world that approximates what’s on the page instead of literalizing it. The best adaptations make more than just superficial changes and expand the source material in new directions. (HBO’s Station Eleven is one adaptation that improves on the original by changing it). But this adaptation just manages to turn substance into style. Instead of finding new meaning in an oft-told tale, or streamlining the story to get at its core, Emerald Fennell’s movie overwhelms us with visual luxuries to distract from its shallowness. Heathcliff’s less violent and enraged and more like a cardboard cutout of a loverboy; he and Cathy are in a love triangle that’s a lot more like Titanic’s than the ambivalent, layered one in the book. Most controversially, much of the social criticism in Emily Brontë’s book has also been erased. Watching Wuthering Heights felt like gorging on the aspics at the Linton’s dinner table—the movie’s a feast for the senses without a main course.
Ress: Absolutely not—see: One Battle After Another—but this takes all of Wuthering Heights’ most compelling themes and turns it into One Perfect Shot fodder. If your adaptation is not going to be faithful, you gotta have a more interesting take on the material than that.
6. Jacob Elordi: Where we at?
Ress: He’s often the best part of films that are quite flawed: Priscilla; Saltburn; Oh, Canada; Frankenstein—all great Elordi performances, but I can’t say I’m all that eager to watch any of those movies again. He’s totally got the juice, and I’d love to see it used in something, you know, good!
Hunt: You know how on The Traitors no one suspects Rob Rausch because he’s so mind-numbingly gorgeous? Elordi’s so hot that Wuthering Heights forgets Heathcliff’s supposed to be an animal-torturing psychopath. Maybe every movie should just put Elordi under a mound of prosthetics—that way, directors and audiences alike won’t be blinded by his hotness, and we can actually get to see him act.
Gruttadaro: It just goes to show you how much we let tall people get away with. But maybe Fennell’s to blame here, because I don’t think Elordi can be whatever Heathcliff was supposed to be—and the only reason he’s in this movie is because Fennell thinks he’s cover-of-a-romance-novel dreamy. He certainly can’t convincingly sport a bushy beard. Guy was out here giving late era Jesus Christ.
Walker: He’s so tall! And eternally Nate Jacobs if he’s doing anything left of kind. I was lightly intrigued by his performance as scruffy teenage Heathcliff, quietly emitting his eternal devotion to Cathy via a pre-grief beard. But when he returned to the moors as a mysteriously wealthy fuckboy, complete with dainty gold hoops and lacrosse hair, he was immediately back in Nate Jacobs territory. Which is very hard to find sexy, even when he’s licking face and sucking fingers.
Princiotti: I’d like to have a conversation about how he picks projects, but I don’t think this was on him.
7. What is one unanswerable question you have about Wuthering Heights?
Hunt: Does Emerald Fennell actually like this book? Or sex?
Princiotti: What was the point of any of this?
Ress: What does Emerald Fennell have against Nelly Dean?
Walker: How does one wear so much gauze, tulle, and silk in the freezing rain? Also, what exactly are Heathcliff and Cathy’s souls made of, and how do I manufacture an industrial-grade repellant for it?
Gruttadaro: Did people in the 1800s not have locks on their doors? These motherfuckers are going in and out of private residences whenever the hell they please!
8. What should Emerald Fennell do next?
Gruttadaro: Saltburn 2. I can’t believe I’m saying this but Wuthering Heights made me appreciate Saltburn so much more.
Ress: Adapt The Odyssey.
Walker: A MasterClass in color theory.
Princiotti: I was so tickled to share this take before I realized my Big Picture colleagues got there before I did … she should direct music videos. She basically already is. I found Wuthering Heights to be style over substance, but let it be said that Fennell does the style part exceptionally well. Her sets and costumes are sumptuous and she is constantly landing visual punch lines, like Cathy eating the giant strawberry or Isabella’s mushroom phallus scrapbook. Where her storytelling can seem vacant, her visuals can be rich with meaning, as when Cathy looks into a dollhouse and sees the prison her life has become, or, after her alcoholic father dies on his kitchen floor, the camera pans back to reveal the mountains of empty bottles that killed him. These are skills that make a great music video director. Fennell also clearly cares about music—she’s had great needle drops in movies before, and Charli xcx’s soundtrack for this one is excellent. She should direct a big, blockbuster music video for a pop star like Sabrina Carpenter who has an astute sense for provocation and would probably be willing to stick her finger in that jellied fish.
Hunt: Seeing Wuthering Heights in a packed theater felt like watching an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Forget whatever I said my favorite moment was earlier; the best time I had during this movie was when the teenage girl behind me said “Veins is crazy” when the camera zooms in on Cathy’s skin wall, or when the middle-aged couple in front of me said it was the funniest thing they’d seen in years. Bring back MST3K, and let Fennell go off.
