Emerald Fennell has been launched back onto pop culture’s centre stage by her take on the 1847 gothic novel Wuthering Heights. It becomes her third film, but already I get the sense that Fennell wants us to see her as more established, more artistic and more innovative than she really is. Fennell has worked as sole writer and director on all of her films, claiming ‘authorship’ of the films definitely, so what separates her from recognised auteurs? David Lynch had an adjective dedicated to his unique and visceral style with the same number of films as Fennell on his resumé and dedication to the visual, like Fennell’s characterise the films of auteurs like Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson. Fennell employs similar themes (descent into madness, psychosexual exploration, justice and revenge) and visuals (rich and cohesive colour schemes, textural close-ups, gothic-toned atmospheres) across her films, patterns that in many cases separate the auteur from the director, but this dedication to creating a recognisable style seems to come at the cost of what her stories seem to need and occur on a level that doesn’t cut underneath the surface, the immediately observable.
For viewers and critics alike, Fennell’s 2020 debut, Promising Young Woman, seemed, in itself, promising. It was nominated for 5 Oscars and seemed to provide something bold and provocative that Hollywood had felt was missing, but for some, the film wasn’t the empowering and nuanced masterpiece it was heralded as; the film’s ending left a particularly sour taste in the mouths of its critics. After Cassie’s murder at the hands of her best friend’s rapist (Al), Fennell aims to suspend the audience, leave them thinking he’ll go unpunished but, later, provides the police’s arrival and arrest of Al at his wedding as intended relief and resolution. Watching the film for the first time, I had been generously letting its flaws pass me by, in favour of enjoying Carey Mulligan’s engaging performance and the film’s aforementioned ‘boldness’, until this moment.
RAINN estimates that for every 1,000 rapes, 11 are referred for prosecution and only 7 result in a felony conviction. Fennell’s own film points out the inadequacy of the justice systems when it comes to rape, when considering how Nina’s case was dismissed earlier in the film, and yet she wants me to breathe a sigh of relief as police sirens fade in over Juice Newton’s ‘Angel of the Morning’, believe that both Cassie and Nina will be avenged now, that it was all worth it. Critics noted Promising Young Woman’s distinct relationship with and subversion of the rape-revenge genre – the central rape happens off-screen, the film’s vigilante is a woman and the ‘victim’ is the opposite of ‘fridged’ as she becomes a part of Cassie. These developments on the genre are certainly welcomed, but my praise stops with Fennell denying Cassie her revenge. The audience know Cassie is unwell, dangerous and straying destructively from her vigilante role, but forcing her to pay the ultimate sacrifice (piled on top of Nina’s) for a fanciful and deflated version of the revenge the film’s genre predecessors would have afforded her lets Fennell’s debut down and betrays a concerning lack of awareness surrounding the issues she commentates, and how her own narrative construction is perceived.
Fennell’s anticipated and, yet again, alienating follow-up came in the form of Saltburn. The film is similarly beautifully shot and decorated, thoroughly entertaining and well-acted (bar one questionable accent) , but for me, it is also similar in how it falls a little flat beyond its gorgeous veneer. Saltburn claims to be a film about class – class defines Oliver’s relationship with the Cattons and, in fact, Oliver in many ways. The film’s comedy, its most successful facet, is rooted in the lack of self-awareness the Cattons demonstrate, and while this does manifest as cruelty at times (e.g. Felix’s treatment of Farleigh), its prevailing effect is comedy, softening the edges of the Cattons and endearing them to the audience. This, aligned with the shifts in Oliver’s characterisation, begins to disassemble the point it seemed Fennell was trying to make: it is no longer possible for the upper class to be villains hidden behind charm and for a working-class boy to take on the shape of an anti-hero.
For Oliver, his class alienates him at Oxford, exoticises him at Saltburn and motivates him throughout, according to Fennell. His class seems to be central to his and the film’s story, but, as he is slowly warped from a downtrodden victim with an understandable awe at the lifestyle of Saltburn to a violent, amoral criminal, his mission becomes less to taste the lifestyle and more to topple and assassinate the upper class at the cost of his own humanity. Fennell may attempt to exonerate the working class of these stereotypes they are so often painted with by suggesting Oliver is not ‘one of them’, but she also erases them from her supposed class story, and seems to suggest that all who aren’t upper class hold a desire like Oliver’s sick desperateness in them.
Additionally, Oliver’s inner life and thoughts don’t receive the attention they deserve, and that is needed to build his character into something the film can lean on the way it does. In the words of New Yorker critic, Richard Brody, Oliver remains a ‘blank’. Putting aside the idea that Fennell didn’t seem able to imagine this development for her only character existing outside the upper class, Oliver is not a villain the audience can root for or against, truly flattening the film. Oliver’s spiral of insane, obsessive behaviour throughout the film captured online attention in spades (notably the bath and grave scenes). It is clear these scenes elicited the shock and abjection Fennell was aiming for in her audiences, but narratively, I fear these scenes have hurt the film more than helped it. They mean the audience can easily track Oliver’s obsession with calculation and murder, preventing any exciting speculation about the ‘why’ or the ‘who’ of the crimes. A montage at the end of the film reveals the extent of Oliver’s planning and, with it, the extent of Fennell’s misunderstanding of her own film’s presentation to audiences.
Finally, we come to “Wuthering Heights”, Fennell’s first ‘adaptation’ (deny it as she might), her most commercially successful film by a country mile and arguably her most polarising; it will come as no shock that I stand on the side of the naysayer. The controversy for the film begins with the casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. In the original material, Cathy dies at 18, and Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights at age 19, while Robbie and Elordi were respectively 34 and 27 when playing these characters. In the case of their ages, the castings seem to shift Bronte’s depictions of naivety, ignorance and abuse into unrecognisable and uncomplicated forms. Elordi is also notably not“dark-skinned” or “gypsy” as Heathcliff is described, bringing into question how Fennell intended to handle plots of racism and the shifts in the story’s relationships that a white Heathcliff induces. The answer comes with the release of the film that she didn’t intend to.
Now, with more context surrounding Fennell’s intentions, the film comes into focus as Fennell’s personal version of Wuthering Heights, a version she experienced at 14. This is certainly felt through the explicit sexuality that replaces confined yearning and the loss of facets that complicate the hyper-focused love story and the audience’s impression of Heathcliff as a perfect romantic lead. For example, Fennell’s addition of sex as present at every turn of their relationship may be what a teenager yearns for when reading the book but it doesn’t provide the depth to their relationship that connects us to them and it sucks the meaning out of pivotal lines that Fennell insisted to keep in, like, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”. The absence of Hindley and justification of Isabella’s abuse in the form of kink play (she consented, after all) seems to serve to uncomplicate the dynamic between Heathcliff and Cathy further, and present Elordi as the perfect man. He is completely motivated by Cathy and yet positioned to never cross a moral boundary for her. I felt the characters actually became unlikable as this complexity drained away, and subsequently, it became hard to care about the central plot. This criticism of the central love story not being enough to carry the film feels exacerbated by the shining performances of the supporting cast (Alison Oliver and Owen Cooper as notable standouts).
Fennell’s reasoning for this trimming is reasonable – the story is too “dense and complicated and difficult”, in her words – but doesn’t excuse the film’s flaws. Nothing is used to fill the holes where the story’s support once existed. Fennell’s adaptation appears, to me, as a glamorous skin draped over a skeleton missing half its bones – a theme that has begun to establish itself by her third film. Not something a set of quote marks can explain away.
An example that comes to mind when considering Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. It features a modernised setting and the shifts that come with this (costume, cinematography, staging, etc.), some of the characters even change, but the dialogue is retained. The film was alienating at the time, but has become a cult classic because it maintained all that is so important about Shakespeare. Reviews of the film shifted retrospectively after an initial mixed response, so in ten or twenty years, “Wuthering Heights” may prove critics wrong. But, I hazard it won’t, owed to all that is lost of the essence of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – the moors as the character they existed as, the time defying structure and the true tragedy of the novel to start.
I have covered the flaws I interpret in Fennell’s three films extensively, but what truly stops her from being the auteur I believe she wants to be seen as cannot be found in the nooks and crannies of her work but in how her authorship feels and whether her choices in these films have formed a unique style that shapes and serves the stories she tells. Unfortunately, I feel that much like her films themselves, her pursuit of auteurship is an exciting, romantic, but superficial endeavour.
Editor: Grace Lees