Wuthering Heights: What do the critics make of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation?

The new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has drawn mixed reviews, with one critic blasting it as an “emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire”, while another hails it as “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”.

The film, from Saltburn director Emerald Fennell, is a very loose adaptation of the classic gothic novel by Emily Bronte and the filmmaker says it recalls her experience of reading the text as a teenager.

The BBC gave it four stars and said: “Under it all Fennell channels something essential in the book – the corrosive behaviour that can result from thwarted desire.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi at the UK premiere of Wuthering Heights PA Media

“Jealousy, anger and vengeance are as natural to Cathy and Heathcliff as their endless passion for each other. If you embrace the film’s audacious style and think of it as a reinvention not an adaptation, this bold, artful Wuthering Heights is utterly absorbing.”

However, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it two stars and said the film “doesn’t have the live-ammo impact” of Fennell’s previous efforts, Saltburn and the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman.

He added: “For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.”

The Times’ Kevin Maher also gave it two stars and criticised the “chemistry-free central romance between the bizarrely uninteresting Heathcliff and Cathy”.

He added: “There are conspicuous longueurs and characterisations that barely reflect the complexity of an Instagram reel let alone the greatest gothic novel in English literature.”

Maher said Robbie’s Cathy “lives entirely on the surface like Bronte Barbie and never burns from the core”, while Elordi’s Heathcliff is “a fatally shallow characterisation”, and “pouty man-candy with a shaky Yorkshire accent and, by chuffing ’eck, an alarmingly overexposed tongue”.

The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey only gave the film one star and said it is “an astonishingly hollow work”, adding: “It uses the guise of interpretation to gut one of the most impassioned, emotionally violent novels ever written, and then toss its flayed skin over whatever romance tropes seem most marketable.”

She said: “Heathcliff, for one, has become a wet-eyed, Mills & Boon mirage created entirely to induce swooning, always on standby to shield Cathy from the cold and rain. How infinitely dull he is compared to the complicated, challenging figure we meet in the book.

“Robbie and Elordi don’t entirely lack chemistry, but their characters do feel so thinned out that their performances are pushed almost to the border of pantomime. She’s wilful and spiky. He’s rough but gentle. That’s about it.”

However, the film drew high praise from The Daily Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, who gave it five stars and praised is as “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”, adding: “It’s an obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions.”

He continued: “Is it as lewd as Saltburn? I’d say it’s lewder, if slightly less graphic. In some ways, it’s a traditional bodice-ripper – bosoms heave, flanks trickle with sweat – though again, bodily fluids are savoured, while Saltburn’s Alison Oliver makes a devilishly funny and unsettling return as Miss Isabella, Linton’s initially meek and genteel ward.

“Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.”

Wuthering Heights is released in UK cinemas on February 13.