WUTHERING HEIGHTS (in theatres)

Director Emerald Fennell’s (“Saltburn”) fecundity lies in her darkest, imaginative, iconoclastic psyche; within minutes Emily Bronte’s  (1818-1848) novel slips into obscurity, overshadowed by Fennell’s castration of  one of literature’s most turbulent, obsessive love stories written when Emily was twenty-seven; imbued with a bleak, wet landscape reminiscent of her home in the Yorkshire Moors of Northern England; dying of tuberculosis at thirty, one of three prodigious sisters: Anne, (1820-1849),  Charlotte (1816-1855), known as quirky & cruel, similar to “Catherine” in “Wuthering Heights”. The cinematography lends grim, perpetually moist atmosphere to a movie laden in murky moods, violent, sickening obsessions, bestiality; it is feelingless, and grossly, extensively salacious; “Heathcliff” and “Catherine’’ never were intimate, a magnetic pull in the book.

Two finer actors could not have been chosen for “Wuthering Heights”, Margot Robbie (also a producer) as a troubled “Catherine” and Jacob Elordi as a tortured “Heathcliff”. In their youth his role as a loyal, unschooled dog cannot be usurped by a shorn, beardless adult with wealth, unaccounted for. For all their torrid sexuality, grunted, grueling ardor, erased is compassion and sensitivity, only animalistic desire and gratification. Heathcliff’s cruelty and psychological depravity sinks with the debasement of “Isabella Linton” (Alison Oliver); unnecessary poetic license by Fennell.

Dinner time in the Linton mansion was showtime for DeBeers Diamonds, India’s rubies and emeralds from wherever; highlighting “Edgar Linton’s” (Shazad Latif) Cathy’s husband’s, purchasing power; myriads of carats outweighing Cathy.

“Wuthering Heights” 2026 is a withering, smutty, tasteless tale of oversexed, intellectually taxed individuals who would have fared better if they had visited 1939’s version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; herein lies the nuances shunned in Fennell’s, dead travesty.

TWO STARS!!

Peneflix