By Amie Yansane
This past Valentine’s Day weekend, I decided to convince my roommate to go see Emerald
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” Months before seeing the film, I had seen many complaints
about the possible elements, one of the most controversial being the whitewashing of Jacob
Elordi’s character, Heathcliff. Although I had a personal problem with the erasure of a brown
man in this particular media, I still decided to push through and watch this movie even if I ran
the risk of disliking it.
Even aside from inaccuracies, I still couldn’t understand the film the way Fennel
intended–whatever that may have been. It fell short, and surprisingly, I couldn’t say I was
disappointed since I walked in with low expectations that were supported by one-to-two-star Letterboxd
reviews. Besides the low ratings from my friends and peers, here is my personal low rating of
“Wuthering Heights.”
Overall Thoughts
As I said before, I tried to set aside the inaccuracies in this adaptation of Brontë’s film so I
could critique the movie as a whole. Even aside from that, it still fell short. Even with a decent
script and excellent shots, I still couldn’t get a grip on what Fenell tried to do with the Wuthering
Heights plot.
Although there seems to be a plot to the movie, there’s not a whole bunch to it. I’m aware that
it tries to stage itself as a dark romance, but I found that there was no actual romance between the
characters. There was little chemistry between Cathy and Heathcliff, so when they parted ways
in the exposition, I wasn’t hoping they would get back together, which is the goal that romance
media has!
Quite frankly, too many pointless sex scenes. I say pointless because there wasn’t anything
necessarily symbolic about the sex either or did it really serve a purpose for the plot. To me, the
sex scenes seemed like a place holder rather than a milestone for the relationship or
explanation of the dynamic between Cathy and Heathcliff.
When Cathy and Heathcliff were not shown pleasuring one another, there was some sort of
sensual imagery in another scene, and like the sex, it didn’t seem to have a purpose. Fennel often
used food, specifically egg yolks, for the sake of sensual imagery. It was quite uncomfortable
watch, but maybe that was one of the things I couldn’t quite get.
Other than that, the movie is okay. It is, for sure, not an Oscar nominee, but it isn’t a complete
fail. Fennell and all the crew involved did an amazing job with the cinematography and the set
design, as most of it seemed uniform and actually captured what Wuthering Heights would’ve
been if the storyline had been followed the way Brontë intended. Unfortunately, that wasn’t
enough for me to enjoy this adaptation as much as I should have. And so, I rate Fennell’s
Wuthering Heights a 6/10. It’s a bit lower than my review for “Saltburn”, but hopefully her next
release redeems this recent one.