Wuthering Heights
Young Cathy Earnshaw (newcomer Charlotte Mellington) has a lady's companion but is more herself running wild in the moors, so when her father (Martin Clunes, TV's 'Doc Martin') brings home a scruffy, abused boy as a 'pet,' she'll name him 'after her late brother,' Heathcliff (Owen Cooper, TV's 'Adolescence'), discovering someone who is more herself than she is. But the adult Cathy, facing ruin after her alcoholic father gambles away their livelihood, is tricked by that companion, Nelly (Hong Chau, "The Whale," "The Menu"), into stating that marriage to Heathcliff would be a degradation within his earshot, causing him to leave and her to reluctantly marry wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif, "Magpie"), a decision that will destroy everything around "Wuthering Heights."
Laura's Review: C+
In her bastardized adaptation of the Brontë classic, writer/director Emerald Ferrell ("Promising Young Woman," "Saltburn") splashes the fevered fantasies of her inner teenaged girl across the screen in a film whose raison d'être is extremely good looking people lusting after each other.
Featuring preposterous production design (Suzie Davies, "Saltburn") which at one point uses leeches in a design that extends from Cathy's breast up onto her pink bedroom walls, Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" may be ridiculous but it certainly scratches a particular itch.
Before we even see an image on screen, we can hear the labored sound of sex over the film's opening credits. But Ferrell's fooled us, instead revealing the sounds to be coming from a man being hanged in a town square well attended by those excited about a 'hanging day' that clearly is a crowd turn-on. A man pushes a dirty young boy through the mob, one we may assume is Heathcliff. Soon he's running about the moors with the young blonde beauty, even taking a whipping for her when she delays their return for the petulant Mr. Earnshaw's birthday dinner.
Editor Victoria Boydell ("Saltburn") segues from the bloodied streaks on the young Heathcliff's back to the scars on the hirsute adult's, Elordi in long hair, moustache and beard to resemble a sexy, shaggy beast who now labors about the estate, while still enjoying gallivanting about with Cathy, now played by Margot Robbie. One day as they sit on an outcropping together, Cathy observes a string of carriages delivering goods to the neighboring Thrushcroft Grange, salivating over the Lintons' wealth and when she asks Heathcliff what he'd do were he rich, when he mentions taking a wife, then teasingly mentions a townswoman, Cathy goes into a pique. Chaffing at the bit for an invite, Cathy finally walks over, spying over a wall where Linton's beribboned charge (no longer sister here) Isabella (Alison Oliver, "Saltburn," "The Order") relates the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet,' Ferrell's adolescent equivalence in foreshadowing. Seeing her face briefly, Isabella shrieks, declaring she's seen a ghost and when Linton investigates, finds Cathy elegantly posing on the ground with a sprained ankle. Heathcliff frets back home, Nelly forbidding him from fetching her, and, after six weeks, Cathy returns in a fancy carriage, made over by the fussy Isabella.
Ferrell's adaptation is a movie of extreme contrasts - cruelties and kindness, wealth and poverty, virginal white and adulterous red, Heathcliff's beast-to-beauty transformation, a debasing ravishing stopped every 10 seconds for permission to continue, but above all - sex and death. It can be kinky, such as when Cathy spies the Heights' servant Joseph (Ewan Mitchell, "Saltburn") tacking up their servant Zillah (Amy Morgan, "We Live in Time") before riding her, Heathcliff arriving to put his hands over her eyes (and his body over hers). It can also be erotically silly, that scene cutting to a snail making its way up a pain of glass, Cathy getting hot and bothered watching Zilla knead dough, then pleasuring herself out on those wild and windy moors. Ferrell will also fold in a literal nod to Ibsen's 'A Doll House,' Isabella presenting Cathy with a wedding present of a doll handmade to look like her, its hair purloined from Cathy's brush, to place inside the elaborate child sized version of the Grange where Cathy will be trapped.
After five years, Heathcliff returns, notifying Cathy by repeating one of her childhood tricks, placing eggs in her bed (which now also symbolize the pregnancy he won't find about until much later). Dressed like a gentleman, clean shaven, his eyes still smoldering and intent on revenge, Heathcliff changes his tune when Cathy tells him he only heard part of that long ago conversation and not the bit about loving him. The two fall into a reckless affair, but Nelly will once again intercede, telling Linton just what's going on and when Heathcliff loses access to Cathy, he takes up with the very willing Isabella in order to torture her, marrying Linton's ward and chaining her up like a dog at Wuthering Heights, which he now owns.
There has been a lot of discussion about casting Elordi as the dark-skinned Heathcliff, a move that seems especially weird given that the very English Linton has been cast with an actor of Pakistani descent, but Elordi certainly delivers what Ferrell is after here. Unfortunately many of the characterizations suffer from 'having her cake and eating it too' syndrome, Cathy never as cruel as she should be, Heathcliff never as barbaric, at least with his true love. But while Ferrell is too wishy washy in her characterizations, Clune playing a combination of father and (missing) son Hindley like Jeckyll and Hyde, Hong the exception as Nelly, blisteringly vengeful after a slight, she overdoes her production, Wuthering Heights looking like something carved out of black onyx in a Gothic delirium, Thrushcroft Grange a weird mashup of meringue and devil's food.
Ferrell's "Wuthering Heights" is destined to be divisive. It has its moments, but I'll stick with Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' video for my own girlishly fevered, and certainly more literary, interpretation of the classic.
Warner Brothers releases "Wuthering Heights" in theaters on 2/13/2026.
