Ever since the project was first announced, the discourse surrounding Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been… let’s just call it intense. From its initial casting news to our first look at its costumes to the choice to bring back the same kinds of title quotes (i.e., “Wuthering Heights”) in the film’s marketing materials that were so prevalent in Golden Age Hollywood classics, it feels like we’ve been talking about this movie forever, and it’s technically only been in theaters for a few weeks.
To be fair, much of the commentary is warranted. Wuthering Heights is a beloved nineteenth-century novel with a transgressive heart. Fennell is a buzzy, frequently provocative storyteller who gleefully embraces excess in all its forms. The idea that she might take on not just a period piece but one of literature’s most famous love stories was a fascinating one, the kind of project that naturally lends itself to all sorts of discussion. And, as it turns out, a wide range of opinions.
Reviews of Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” have been mixed, with critics lamenting its significant structural changes from the source material, its revision of the races of several characters in a story where race matters, and its refusal to directly confront the class issues that are so central to the original novel. The movie’s fans are quick to point out its rich visual style, love of anachronism, and unabashed embrace of the toxic darkness at the heart of its central love story. Some viewers love her desperate, erotic take on Cathy and Heathcliff; others insist that, despite the steamy sex scenes, the film doesn’t get freaky enough. Perhaps this, in the end, is truly what Fennell’s films do best: make us argue with one another.
Depending on who you ask, her 2020 debut, “Promising Young Woman,” which starred Carey Mulligan as a misandrist vigilante, was either a brutal, post-#MeToo battle cry or a weak-willed thriller afraid of its own revenge thesis. Fennell’s follow-up, a “Brideshead Revisited” meets “Talented Mr. Ripley” mash-up called “Saltburn” that featured Barry Keoghan and future “Wuthering Heights” star Jacob Elordi, was both praised as a delightfully perverse eat-the-rich satire and derided as a trainwreck that whitewashed the worst excesses of the posh class Fennell herself happened to be part of. With just three films under her belt, her work has already become established as a lightning rod in popular culture, so much so that it often feels difficult to tell how much of the discourse is driven by misogyny versus a genuine desire to engage with her work in good faith.
This goes double for something like Wuthering Heights, an uncomfortable, dark tale of class, generational abuse, trauma, and revenge that features toxic leads, a doomed romance, and a multigenerational revenge plot that’s so difficult to untangle that most adaptations don’t even try. (The vast majority of film and TV remakes of Brontë’s work almost immediately excise its back half, as Fennell herself does.) Adapting a work like this forces you to make choices and inevitably disappoint. After all, the very act of adaptation is subjective, and some of the best onscreen versions of famous novels (“The Godfather,”“The Shining,”“Dune,” Guillermo del Toro’s recent take on “Frankenstein”) shred their source material with just as much gusto and receive much less criticism for it.
This isn’t to say there isn’t plenty to complain about with regard to Fennell’s films. Her work is purposefully indulgent in both tone and subject matter. She has a repeated blind spot about class issues, is often incredibly unsubtle in her storytelling, and wields shock value like a hammer rather than a scalpel. Her movies aren’t for everyone, it’s true. But as a director and a storyteller, it’s hard to ignore that Fennell also likes to take big swings, gleefully embracing the kind of narrative risks that don’t always pay off, but that land like a thunderclap when they do. And although her frequently provocative style can certainly be polarizing, it’s also necessary, perhaps more than ever these days, when our pop culture landscape is dotted with so many sequels, reboots, and retreads that are little more than slight variations on the same kind of story.
Love her or hate her, Fennell’s got guts. Her work loves to push boundaries, to make statements, to get people talking. Not everything she tries works, but every choice is made with the kind of full-throated commitment to her vision that too many filmmakers lack. We need more of that kind of attitude in our moviemaking, not less.
“Wuthering Heights” is Fennell at her least subversive but perhaps most ambitious. Her take on Brontë’s classic is just that: hers. Viewers may not agree with her particular interpretation—in her foreword to a new edition of the novel, she speaks of recapturing the feeling she experienced reading it for the first time—but her determination to do things her own way is deeply admirable. And the result is not so much an adaptation but a reimagining, a take that explores the feelings connected to the text as much as any of the words on the page.
This isn’t that unusual. Genre films are, as often as not, as much about what they make us feel as any specific action that’s happening onscreen at any given moment. Sci-fi epics and superhero blockbusters often don’t even make sense, comprised of the kind of technobabble that falls apart if you squint at it funny. Why shouldn’t Fennell embrace the idea of a “Wuthering Heights” that is little more than the burning emotion and sharp-edged eroticism that’s conveyed in the original but rarely stated outright?
Brontë’s novel is, among many other things, a tale of destructive, frustrated, haunting love, and Fennell’s film is too, a mix of nightmare and ecstasy in which vibes rule the day. It’s hardly what anyone would call a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material. But it gets so much of its spirit exactly right, a translation that speaks to many of the reasons we all keep coming back to this story in the first place.
That is, of course, what good storytellers do. Fennell will almost certainly keep right on enraging the critics who find her work unsubtle, excessive, or stubbornly unwilling to interrogate larger intersectional issues, even as she delights those who embrace her sharp wit, sumptuous details, and her feverish determination to have it her own way. And we’ll keep talking about whatever she makes next—for good or ill—because we need her, and filmmakers like her, whether we want to admit it or not.
