Glossy Cosplay, Icy Heat for a New Generation in ‘Wuthering Heights’

Glossy Cosplay, Icy Heat for a New Generation in ‘Wuthering Heights’

By Lynn Venhaus

Visually stunning but emotionally empty, “Wuthering Heights” is an abomination for fans of the classic gothic romance, a disservice to Emily Bronte’s dark source material about eternal love, longing, hurtful pride and ruthless revenge.

The 1847 novel took place on the harsh Yorkshire moors. The impoverished, abused Heathcliff, adopted into the affluent Earnshaw family around 1771, works manual labor, and forges a special bond with the privileged, petulant Catherine.

However, writer-director Emerald Fennell claims it’s not an adaptation, but a bold and sexy interpretation of how the book made her feel when she read it at age 14. Maybe she could have changed the title to avoid less-than-flattering comparisons?

Fennell’s spin is edgy excess as she favors kinky bodice-ripping sexual compulsion over the book’s spiritual obsession that lingers long after reading. The emotional heft that the novel delivered for 180 years is lacking,

Australians Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are pretty people who are magnetic on screen and talented Oscar-nominated actors.

Although Robbie, at 35, is too old for her character, and Elordi’s modern casting is controversial because he’s not a person of color, they display a spark as the doomed lovers — refined, selfish Catherine and rough, tormented Heathcliff.

In this salacious version, the heavy lifting required for such complicated characters in what would be considered a toxic and manipulative relationship in today’s world isn’t important.

Treated as an outcast, Heathcliff is described by Bronte as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect” and “dirty, ragged, black-haired,” so speculation that he was black or brown-skinned continues.

Playing the young roles, Brits Owen Cooper (Emmy winner for “Adolescence”) and Charlotte Mellington, excel at establishing the characters’ demeanors.

 In previous screen portrayals of grown-up Heathcliff – Laurence Olivier in 1939, Timothy Dalton in 1970, and Ralph Fiennes in 1992, with Richard Burton in a 90-minute DuPont Show of the Month in 1958 and Tom Hardy in a two-part series on Masterpiece Theatre in 2009 — all were white.

Only one – James Howson, a black actor, portrayed the brooding anti-hero in a 2011 film by director Andrea Arnold. So, the debate continues.

The tone is troubling too – Elordi is never savage or a brute to Robbie, and she’s not nearly as wild as the book depicts Cathy. Their relationship, so-called “forbidden,” was thwarted because of societal constraints in the Victorian Era.

Fennell gussied up the look with ready-for-influencers’ glossiness that is distracting and merely decorative — and at times, not period-appropriate.

The shiny surface spotlights the crafts over substance, foregoing the book’s deeper meaning about twisted, destructive intergenerational consequences because Fennell cut out the second half.

She has reduced this timeless tale to a tedious 2 hours, 16 minutes of fan fiction, with too many scenes reminiscent of 1990s perfume ads, complete with.artsy shadows and peculiar attitudes.

Costume designer Jacqueline Durran goes increasingly over-the-top with Catherine’s opulent, outlandish outfits – including an iridescent cellophane dress accented with a large pink bow, as if she’s a gift for her new husband. How meta!

She and production designer Suzie Davis get carried away with a color palette emphasizing red and pink. An odd collection of leeches on the wall of Catherine’s palatial dainty pink-and-freckled bedroom is a ridiculous misuse of the era’s medical customs.

Oscar-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren (“La La Land”) emphasizes unrelenting weather elements to convey the windy, rainy and foggy conditions of the rugged moors, employing impressionistic lighting and sweeping long takes to heighten the gritty geographic-specific realism.

When Cathy marries aristocratic Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) of neighboring estate Thrushcross Grange for financial stability, as her gambling drunkard father (Martin Clunes) has frittered away their fortune, a devastated Heathcliff feels betrayed and leaves, only to come back five years later a rich man.

After he buys Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff later seeks revenge on everyone who has wronged him (although the film misses the mark here by not continuing that storyline). As soulmates, he and Catherine maintain an intense and tumultuous relationship, more sexually explicit here than the 18th-century book.

Spitefully, he marries Edgar’s sheltered, child-like sister Isabella (a terrific Alison Oliver). This sadistic-masochistic relationship is the film’s most troubling insertion, next to the shocking hanging scene that opens the film as a sexually arousing public event (things you can’t unsee).

Known for her provocative, twisted takes on relationships (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”), Fennell has established herself as someone with a fresh, unique vision. In this strange misfire, the mood is more important than the message, and her tinkering has cut out some crucial characters or revised them in ways that don’t make sense.

She eliminated Catherine’s bully brother Hindley, who was cruel to Heathcliff while the dad was kind, changed the parents’ narratives, and dropped the second half of the book, among other puzzlers.

Therefore, characters aren’t haunted by the tragic past, and the supernatural elements aren’t brought up. That’s a huge part of this story. Fennell didn’t want to go the distance, and because of that, the character development is scattered.

Fennell has made Nelly Dean, the maid who is more of a Heathcliff ally in the book, the villain here, and is slyly played by the superb Oscar-nominated actress Hong Chau as someone wounded and lashing out (Mrs. Danvers, anyone?). It’s another confusing element.

In her Oscar-winning screenplay for “Promising Young Woman,” Fennell presented an original view on gender disparity, and “Saltburn” was an intriguing class clash, a twisty take on “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” both ramping up shocks and dropping jaws — effective contemporary pieces that kickstarted conversations (and brisk business for the novelty candle “Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater”).

The frenzy/firestorm continues here with a polarizing work, but this time it’s rooted in a beloved book. Does the original intent come through for the uninitiated, who aren’t familiar with the star-crossed lovers’ tragedy that continues to fascinate?

What will be the lasting impressions? It seems disposable, save for.bizarre images of dog collars, messy broken eggs, mountains of gin bottles, scarred flesh, pig’s blood, voyeurism, eccentric dolls, and lots of ribbons.

To add to its surreal aesthetic, Charli XCX, a pop star known for her synth-electro beats, has created a modern techno soundtrack.  

In its favor, Fennell kept some of the most revered quotes in: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” and “I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

If an adaptation – say Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby” — brings a dynamic energy to the moral complexities of a moment in time – then we can accept the changes, but when one ignores the psychology in favor of spectacle, it’s merely a parade of ‘strike-a-pose’ cosplay scenes.

Call me a romantic traditionalist, but this ‘loosely based’ adaptation is cringy, turgid, unnecessary and interminable.

“Wuthering Heights” is a 2026 period drama romance directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington. It is rated R for sexual content, some violent content and language and runs 2 hours, 16 minutes. It opens in theaters Feb. 13. Lynn’s Grade: D.

Emma Mackey Fuels ‘Emily,’ Thoughtful Portrait of Bronte As Storyteller

Emma Mackey Fuels ‘Emily,’ Thoughtful Portrait of Bronte As Storyteller

By Alex McPherson

With a wonderfully multifaceted performance from Emma Mackey, director Frances O’Connor’s “Emily” is a vibrant, poignant, heartbreaking, and somewhat reductive story loosely inspired by the life of Emily Brontë— full of contradictory elements that entangle in interesting ways, not unlike Emily herself.

Tracing the events leading up to Emily writing the seminal novel Wuthering Heights, “Emily” takes place during the mid-19th century among the blustery moors and pervasively overcast skies of Yorkshire, England, as our heroine experiences joy, sorrow, and self-actualization in an environment where she’s pressured to conform to restrictive ideals.

We first see Emily on her deathbed, as her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling, bringing much more to the table than “mean sister” energy) scolds her for writing the book and demands she explain how she conceived it. The camera (helmed by cinematographer Nanu Segal, in one of the film’s prolonged close-ups), rotates from horizontal to vertical, as we face Emily head-on and dive into both her, and O’Connor’s, imagination to see how it came to be.

Flashback to some years earlier, and the Brontës are actively mourning the loss of their mother. The household consists of father, Patrick (Adrian Dunbar), a conservative priest unsure of how to deal with Emily’s idiosyncrasies, and sisters Anne (Amelia Gething, charming but underused) and the prim-and-proper Charlotte, who, studying to become a teacher, is envious of Emily’s talents and self-hating in her own alternate paths to achieve what’s expected of her.

There’s also the squirrely brother, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead, in a devastating turn conveying both playfulness and real hurt), an aspiring writer and painter who Emily feels intensely close to; their bond proves nervously liberating as Branwell indulges in vices and trouble-making.

Emily herself is reclusive, brash, creative, brave, and vulnerable all at once — described as “the Strange One” by locals — who finds solace among the natural world, crafting poems that illuminate her complex inner thoughts. While her siblings find success and failure in their pursuits, Emily remains at the family estate, sheltered and repressed from embracing her calling. The arrival of handsome curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who ends up giving Emily French lessons, sparks something fiery within her — launching a romance where both parties are pulled between their passion and practical reality — with fittingly melodramatic, and, as “Emily” posits, inspirational results.

Although “Emily” doesn’t fully embody the unconventionality of its brilliant subject, O’Connor’s film shines as a tribute to imagination itself, illuminating the ways in which it frees and isolates, wrapped up in a gothic drama alive with raw, sensual energy. What’s lost in the sometimes clunky screenplay is more than made up for by the ensemble’s power, especially Mackey, who brings a tangibly lived-in authenticity to her portrayal, resisting easy classification at every turn.

Mackey, recent winner of the Rising Star Award at this year’s BAFTAs, who starred in “Sex Education” on Netflix and Kenneth Branagh’s “Death of the Nile” last year, commands attention.

O’Connor (herself an actor in such films as “Mansfield Park” and “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”) often centers her in frame, letting us observe subtle, and not so subtle, shifts in mood. The film refuses to paint her in broad strokes and, as a result, packs a visceral wallop as we ride this roller coaster of feeling along with her. We see Emily physically shrink from social interactions and light up when immersed in her writing: moments of high-strung anxiety and euphoric release. 

She runs the emotional gauntlet over the course of the film — happiness, mischievousness, obsession, and crushing sadness — sometimes alternating between tones in the same scene, with Mackey helping ground even the most over-the-top developments. Her chemistry with Jackson-Cohen is sizzling, though their relationship is doomed from the start, and her sequences with Whitehead are similarly (uncomfortably) charged, creating a tragic love triangle that heads down a marginally predictable path for period dramas.

Accompanied by Segal’s lush, tactile cinematography, authentic costume design by Michael O’Connor, and an amazingly dynamic score by Abel Korzeniowski (mixing cacophonous strings with melancholy, sometimes removing and focusing sound entirely for dramatic effect), “Emily” is quite the sensory treat.

O’Connor incorporates magical realism throughout, bringing a near-supernatural tinge to Emily’s talent that deeply affects those around her. One pivotal scene, for example, involves a game where Emily, her siblings, and Weightman don a mask and pretend to be someone else. Emily pretends to be their late mother — disturbing everyone in the room to their core as the shutters blow open with a fierce wind, like a seance is taking place. It’s a frightening, though overcooked, instance of O’Connor’s stylistic bravado, illustrating storytelling as an immersive, unnerving force.

This memorable scene also ties into the competing forces that torment the characters, not just Emily, as they go about their lives. Emily refuses to conform to societal standards, while becoming isolated and othered as a result. She’s attracted to Weightman more as a vessel for her endeavors than traditional romance, but this dependence spells drastic consequences.

Weightman, himself a poet in his own way, albeit held back by religious expectations, is simultaneously drawn to Emily and petrified by guilt. Branwell battles addiction and self-doubt over his abilities as an artist, and Charlotte denies Emily’s worth, and her own interests, via deep-set insecurities. The film itself is torn between the more expected trappings of the genre and the fantastical, occasionally breaking free to present something surprising and irreverent. 

And the narrative, for all its success in humanizing characters, ultimately winds up undercutting Emily’s own creativity to declare that Wuthering Heights was written largely through lived experience. Who knows how much of “Emily” actually happened, but its final act — full of last-minute revelations, crying, and swooning music — feels rushed, giving tidy resolution and clear takeaways from such a layered character.

It’s unfortunate that “Emily” leaves this crucial element of her being, her creative process, so disappointingly half-baked and based primarily on her experiences with men. O’Connor had a vast canvas to work with thematically here, and in this sense, she doesn’t treat Emily’s legacy with the reverence she deserves.

Her film is still profoundly affecting, with Mackey giving what will undoubtedly be one of the year’s most captivating performances.

“Emily,” a 2022 biographical drama about writer Emily Bronte, her family and loves, is directed by Frances O’Connor and stars Emma Mackey, Alexandra Dowling, Fionn Whitehead, Adrian Dunbar, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Amelia Gething and Gemma Jones. It is Rated Rated R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use, and is 2 hours, 10 minutes. It opens Feb. 24 in select local theaters. Alex’s Grade: B+.