Spoilers ahead for both Emily Brontë’s novel and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.
As an avid lover of page-to-screen adaptations, I had high hopes for the recent release of Wuthering Heights. Leading up to the premiere, the film received plenty of attention from both critics and public audiences.
My hopes were high, since I believed it truly couldn’t get better than a tragic, gothic love story starring the one and only Jacob Elordi—or so I thought.
After my initial viewing, I found the film mediocre at best. The entirety of the film felt like an erotic fan fiction, with a lack of any real emotion.
However, it wasn’t until after that that I decided to do some research on the original novel that I truly lost all hope I once had for the film.
I would like to preface this review by saying that I am a fan of director Emerald Fennell’s previous work, as Saltburn holds a 5 star rating on my Letterbox. Regardless of the controversy surrounding her, I believe that this film is a direct reflection of why her personal style is so polarizing– and why it was terribly imposed on this film.
With that being said, I want to clarify that my opinions in this article are not shaped by the fact that I did not enjoy the movie, but rather by the fact that it should never have been considered an adaptation to begin with.
The predominant issue starts with the film’s title and marketing. If you haven’t already noticed, the film’s title features quotation marks around Wuthering Heights. Director Emerald Fennell explains that this is not a grammatical error but rather a way to indicate that it is not a faithful adaptation of the original story.
In countless interviews, Fennell explains how the film will explore her own imagined experience of the book. In my eyes, this sounds like a lousy excuse for not coming up with an original idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that a page-to-screen adaptation needs to be a direct reflection of the original source, but to have little to no regard for the content itself just seems a little nonsensical.
At its core, the film focuses on the doomed love between a mysterious, yet alarmingly attractive orphan, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and a captivating estate owner’s daughter, Catherine (Margot Robbie). Besides the portrayal of the two’s deeply intense, borderline obsessive relationship, the film lacks both substantial plotlines and character development compared to the original novel.
So, if the only content Fennell took from Brontë’s narrative was the hot-and-steamy relationship between the two characters, why consider adapting the story in the first place?
The changes made to the original narrative go far beyond modernizing the storyline; they completely reinterpret the text. Changes of character race, disposal of entire acts and removal of primary characters are the most significant modifications made in the film.
At its core, Fennell’s reimagining was nothing more than an attempt to turn the doomed love story into the film’s focus rather than character background. With these efforts came a sense of neglect of the original message Brontë was trying to convey. Decades of rigid social hierarchies and betrayal are distilled into a single depiction of ‘I can fix him’ complexes.
And yes, this is not the first time an adaptation has drifted from the original work, but with Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, it simply feels as though she was uninterested in the plot.
By oversimplifying the narrative, Fennell relies on dramatic ambience and intense romance to sell the movie, which only makes it another run-of-the-mill period drama.
This is why I believe the film should never have been granted the title ‘Wuthering Heights,’ as the name was used solely as an attention/money grab.
Perhaps the movie is okay for people who don’t want to think too much about what they are watching, and I mean, Emerald Fennell did exactly that. She created a movie at a time when we’re supposed to think about nothing too hard.
Regardless of whether you enjoyed the film or not, it is undeniable that Fennell strayed far away from the source material. This might not be significant to passive viewers who just accepted the film for what it was; however, in the long run, this adaptation says a lot about the future of filmmaking.