Every time a new adaptation of a classic novel hits the silver screen, critics rush to compare it (nearly always unfavorably) to the book. There's a lot to be said for this approach — after all, Hollywood has been turning to literature as long as the medium has been around, as Virginia Woolf reminds us in a 1926 essay: "The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, [but] the alliance is unnatural." However, film criticism risks becoming tripped up when too preoccupied with source material, when the important question for most audiences is whether the movie is enjoyable on its own merits, without the specter of its literary beginnings?

Luckily for you, I've never read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and therefore come to Emerald Fennell's newest adaptation unencumbered by the burden of foreknowledge. And yet still, the film is nearly identical to Fennell's two prior outings, Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023): a creative concept, written poorly and filmed well. 

That concept, according to Fennell, is "the feeling of a teenage girl reading [Wuthering Heights] for the first time." And indeed, this version of Brontë's novel has all the surface-level gloss, shock-factor sex stuff, and ultimate hollowness of a high schooler's fantasies. It tells the story of Cathy, who's a young girl in 1700s England when her alcoholic father adopts an abused boy she names Heathcliff. They're fast friends, with a stepsibling relationship that seems to verge, unhealthily, on childhood crushing. 

Grown up, any inclination that their relationship is unhealthy has been all but confirmed. Adult Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) have obvious sexual tension, particularly when Cathy announces she'll court their wealthy new neighbor Edgar (Shazad Latif) much to Heathcliff's jealousy and disapproval. That tension comes to a fore when they accidentally encounter manor servants having kinky sex, which inspires impure thoughts in both of them and inspires Heathcliff to make an overt advance. But Cathy demurs, and a failure of communication between them leaves Heathcliff to abandon the manor while Cathy is left to settle for a smitten Edgar. We, like Cathy, wonder what might have been had she ended up with Heathcliff — especially when he returns, years later, mysteriously fabulously wealthy and intent on stealing Cathy away from her life of domesticity.

I somehow have no doubt that Brontë's novel (widely considered one of the greatest of all time) is fairly complex. The same cannot be said for Fennell's adaptation, whose central conceit is to tell a story in a way that a horny teen would like. That, unsurprisingly, doesn't involve a lot of emotional depth. Edgar is played for the same foolish cuckold as Mark Ruffalo's trying character in Poor Things (2023); lady-in-waiting Nelly (Hong Chau) is a two-dimensional scapegoat on whom blame for nearly all the tragedies of the film falls; and Cathy's father (Martin Clunes) is a cartoonishly mean-spirited abuser with a goonish set of false teeth to match. Only Alison Oliver, who plays Edgar's ward Isabella with the same horniness and crankiness she brought to Saltburn, is able to summon silly, comedic lines out of a darker, more psychosexual nature. 

Perhaps more problematically for the kind of film Fennell is targeting, Robbie and Elordi have scant chemistry. We're left wondering why this is, given that they are two of the sexiest actors alive. Part of the blame is certainly on the script, which chops and screws the language of Georgian England with an awkward, contemporary glint that undercuts any romantic heft. Maybe another part is that the 6'5" Elordi towers over the 5'6" Robbie in a gawky, alien way; maybe it's that although she's supposed to be sexually immature (apparently masturbating for the first time in one scene), she looks (and is) almost a decade older than him; or maybe it's because their characters' ultimately overt physical relationship releases too much of the heat and undermines their longing. Regardless, it's a problem — one accentuated by how convincingly romantic and attached the child actors (Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper) are at the start.

But it all sure looks good, and forces me to once again beg Fennell to direct a movie that someone else has written. Her crew is nearly identical to the one that made Saltburn so visually arresting, and succeeds on many of the same notes: Linus Sandgren is back with sweeping cinematography of foggy highlands and desperate horseback rides, while production design, art direction, and set decoration from Suzie Davies, Caroline Barclay, and Charlotte Dirickx craft fireplaces from plaster hands, bedroom walls from human skin, and dollhouses from eerie replicas within the claustrophobic Wuthering Heights or its parallel expansiveness at the Linton mansion. So while the soundtrack has some hits ("House", whose John Cale vocals penetrate our minds) and misses (pretty much any of the tracks with Charli XCX vocals, which are absurdly out of place), Fennell mostly connects with the audiovisual experience.

With the Wuthering Heights-sized gap on my bookshelf, I can't weigh in on this adaptation's faithfulness (or lack thereof). But I do know that as long as Fennell insists on only making her own screenplays, audiences will be worse for it.