SPOILERS

This Valentine’s Day, director Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights hit the big screen. Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the main characters Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, the movie has faced mixed reviews, mainly due to the extremely loose adaptation and bold directorial choices.

The original source material, the novel Wuthering Heights, is an extremely dark novel, focusing mainly on the themes of classism, revenge, and generational trauma. The novel has two distinct perspectives: one following Catherine and Heathcliff (Catherine’s father’s ward and her playmate), and the second following their children as they deal with fallout of the toxic relationship between Heathcliff, the Earnshaw family, and their wealthy neighbors the Lintons.

The film completely cuts out the second half of the narrative, instead opting for a love story between Heathcliff and Catherine — losing many of the novel’s key themes. 

The first 15 minutes or so follow Heathcliff as he is introduced to the Earnshaw family, and the development of his relationship with Catherine. Surprisingly, these sequences are some of the most enjoyable parts of the movie, as actors Owen Cooper (young Heathcliff) and Charlotte Mellington (young Catherine) both set up their characters’ later development brilliantly. Heathcliff’s devotion to Catherine is obvious through Cooper’s gentle, subtle choices, and similarly Catherine’s bold, demanding personality is personified by Mellington. Generally, the tone of these scenes is genuine, sweet, and not oversexualized in any way. 

The same cannot be said for the rest of the movie, which follows the blossoming of Heathcliff and Catherine’s romance, her marriage to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff’s marriage to Edgar’s sister Isabella as an act of revenge. The remaining two hours was a complete mess of a movie that was not set up for success in any way — mainly due to a combination of bad casting, undue sexualization of characters, and the creation of a world that has no basis in reality. 

Casting of both Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie have been points of contention for many fans of the novel since the adaptation was announced. First, Heathcliff in the book is not white, something that contributes to many of the key themes and social commentaries of race dynamics of the time period. Some defend Fennel’s choice to not have a person of color being the leading man by suggesting that because Heathcliff is a destructive, vengeful character, Fennel would be playing into racial stereotypes. However, she does this in other ways by having two of the film’s main antagonists (servant Nelly and Edgar Linton) both being played by people of color — the only two actors of color in the whole movie. By not having Heathcliff be a person of color, so much of Heathcliff’s character doesn’t make as much sense — in the books, he is not only rejected for being a poor orphan, but also for being a person of color taken in by a white family in the very white setting of Victorian Yorkshire England, and this mistreatment is what drives him to revenge. 

Robbie’s casting was also not the best choice. Although she played the character well, she was far too old to play the 18 year old Catherine. Obviously, Robbie is one of the most stunning actresses right now, and she doesn’t look “old” in the way we traditionally think. However, she is clearly not a teenager, and the film even comments on this. In a scene with her father, a character calls her “well past spinsterhood,” implying that Catherine is around Robbie’s age even though the book places Catherine at 18 years old at the time of her marriage. While this might seem like a small change, it uproots one of the film’s central ideas. Even though the book is asexual in all ways possible, the first half of the movie seems to follow Catherine as she goes through a sexual awakening, with the main catalyst being seeing Heathcliff do yard work. It just doesn’t make a ton of sense to have a 35 year old going through that type of experience; for a teenager, that process seems more logical, but not for Robbie. 

That leads to the film’s most obvious blunder: the overt sexualization of characters when it doesn’t contribute anything to the plot and is done in a very distasteful way. Now, as this movie was branded as a romance, sexual scenes were not unexpected. However, what was pretty surprising to me (a reader of the book) was how Fennel chose to add a sexual tone to almost EVERY SINGLE scene in the movie. Not only that, but the depictions were often very violent, which could be triggering for some viewers. At a certain point it stopped being about romance and was played more for shock value than anything else: for example, in one of the last scenes of the movie, Isabella starts barking like a dog and crawling around on the ground as a ploy to gain Heathcliff’s approval. Overall, this aspect took a lot away from the plot and any sort of positives the movie might’ve had because the constant sexual undertone was quite distracting. 

As for the aesthetic of the movie, it was also quite distracting. Whether it’s costumes or sets, taking creative liberties when adapting historical films is usually acceptable — sometimes directors might want to emphasize certain aspects of the period or brighten up the movie. However, the aesthetic of Wuthering Heights was hardly historical at all, let alone matching the aesthetic of the 1840s. Many aspects of the costuming and set design felt very modern, synthetic, and too saturated for the very dark tone of the novel. 

Despite these very bothersome aspects of the film, there were, surprisingly, some positives. The cinematography was beautiful, especially when it came to shooting the sweeping English countryside. Paired with the cinematography was a really dynamic, well thought out soundtrack by Charli xcx. It perfectly matched the tone of the movie and featured some stunning vocals. 

Although the movie did have a few good elements, I cannot urge you enough not to watch this movie — ESPECIALLY if you’re a fan of the book. Fennel completely missed the mark with this adaptation. The only way to find this movie somewhat enjoyable is to not look at it in any sort of critical lens, even when the negatives are seemingly slapping you in the face. I will never get back the $30.02 I spent on this movie, and the 2 hours and 11 minutes of my afternoon I spent watching this atrocious movie. Don’t make the same mistake I did, and don’t go see Wuthering Heights.