Emerald Fennell strikes again: her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (stylized “Wuthering Heights”) is a misbegotten failure, an unbearably lame movie made by someone who just isn’t that interesting. Bad movies can be fascinating, like Collateral Beauty, Life Itself, or Here Comes the Boom. These 2010s fever dreams were made with precision, craft, and conviction, and what eccentricity they do possess is an accident; they don’t know how baffling they are. Fennell, whose previous films Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were equally inept, is in the curious position of being both a bad filmmaker and an appropriate spokeswoman for her thoroughly middle-of-the-road generation: Millennials. I think a Zoomer Wuthering Heights would be much more interesting, they’re more transgressive and difficult than Millennials. But I doubt Fennell has ever taken a hammer to her own face.
“Wuthering Heights” opens with panting over black—masturbation? No, a hanging. Oh, how very epic. Young Catherine Earnshaw is there, and she’s enthralled just like everyone else. The people in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” love violence, but there’s zero weight to it, just as the “sex” is completely sterile and unsexy despite its “extremity.” Like most adaptations of Brontë’s book, we follow Catherine from the cradle (or the hanging) to the grave, ending before she can doom her children. In fact, Fennell does away with the Earnshaw kids with a remarkably graphic miscarriage scene; like so many contemporary films, “Wuthering Heights” adopts the language of horror movies, using realistic violence, gore, and body mutilation to no real meaningful effect, other than a continued dulling of our senses.
The S&M aspect of the film is so tame and presented so earnestly that it’s hard to ever really engage with “Wuthering Heights” as anything other than a Saturday Night Live skit. No, worse: a Super Bowl commercial. The fake trailers at the beginning of Tropic Thunder were made with more care and intelligence than “Wuthering Heights.” Even the Fifty Shades of Grey movies, released only a decade ago, were far more sexually graphic—and occasionally erotic—than anything Fennell does here. For so much hype about her “hyper-sexual” treatment of the material, there’s zero nudity in “Wuthering Heights.” Girls get whipped and Alison Oliver acts like a dog, but after the hyper sexual 2010s, nothing in this movie is pushing any boundaries. That whole period was really stupid, too, but at least it had SOMETHING going on. Fennell’s too untalented to enjoy on any level. Could she get any worse? I wouldn’t bet against it.
The movie underperformed with approximately $40 million its opening weekend. The movie cost as much to market as it did to make—$80 million—so it’ll need to make $330 million to make a profit. This isn’t bean counting, simply an indicator of where the audience is at. “Wuthering Heights” wasn’t a smash hit for a very simple reason, and it has nothing to do with Fennell: Margot Robbie is too old to play Catherine. But she was interested, and that went a long way to getting Fennell’s dream movie made. I doubt she’s entirely satisfied with her choice. Robbie doesn’t work in the role, it’s as simple as that. The audience for this movie rejects her, even the people who showed up; there are far more people that never even considered seeing it knowing she was going to play Catherine. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff is acceptable, although the stunt diversity casting, another holdover that reinforces the fact that Fennell is terminally uncool, makes no sense within the context of the story.
Not once was I moved, transported, enthralled, what have you. “Wuthering Heights” is a really boring movie made by someone who never would’ve gotten a job in Hollywood 20 years ago. Standards were higher than. Now, most movies look like the trailers at the top of Tropic Thunder, even the Oscar nominees. I’m ready to send in the robots. There’s no way they’ll come up with a worse Wuthering Heights than this one.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith