Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi Fire Up Brontë

It’s possible that your first thought upon encountering Margot Robbie’s Cathy draped over a rock pleasuring herself on the wild and windy West Yorkshire moors in Wuthering Heights might be, “Merle Oberon sure never went at it this hard.” Which probably is a good indication that Emerald Fennell’s unabashedly horny adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic is best approached on its own terms — not in comparison with William Wyler’s 1939 film, in which Oberon co-starred with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, and even less so with the brooding gothic source material. This is not your Penguin Classics school curriculum edition.

Brontë’s 1847 novel has been translated to the screen upwards of 20 times before, in English and American iterations but also international reinterpretations set in France, Japan, Mexico, India and the Philippines, drawing esteemed directors as varied as Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel and Kijū Yoshida.

The most eye-rolling takes ditched the cold, blustery original setting right there in the title in favor of sun-drenched California in teen romances produced by MTV and Lifetime, the latter airdropped into Malibu and rechristened, ahem, Wuthering High. Please, people, not everything in the English-lit canon can withstand Clueless treatment.

Fennell’s overhaul flirts with insanity, and if you can let go of preconceived notions about how this story should be told, it’s arguably the writer-director’s most purely entertaining film — pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color and opulent design, laced with anachronistic flourishes, sexy, pervy, irreverent and resonantly tragic. Often teetering on the verge between silly and clever, it’s Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation, guaranteed to moisten tear ducts and inflame young hearts.

In a collision of ecstasy and despair, Robbie is ideally paired with Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the foundling child picked up off the Liverpool docks and taken in by Cathy’s dotty, widowed father Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), to be raised as her stepbrother. That quasi-sibling proximity does nothing to prevent turbulent desire and mutual intoxication from creeping into their late-childhood games, fully flowering as they enter adulthood.

While there’s a suggestion of racial and class undertones in Cathy’s air of teasing superiority over Heathcliff, the film, like many before it, largely whitewashes the underlying toxicity that makes the central relationship — despite its two-way magnetic pull — unsettling. While Brontë fudges Heathcliff’s specific ethnicity, she’s not exactly being subtle by having characters describe him early on as a “dark-skinned gipsy,” “an imp of Satan” and “a little Lascar,” a term used for Indian and Southeast Asian sailors trafficked by British traders.

The whiff of colonialism and imperialism is all over the novel and its othering of Heathcliff as “a savage.” During the period when the book was set, Liverpool was one of the busiest and most brutal slave-trading ports in England, and there are hints that the young Heathcliff might once have had an “owner.” Whether Brontë’s writing is inherently racist or condemning racism has long been a subject of debate.

Those aspects that make Wuthering Heights a somewhat uncomfortable text for contemporary readers are for the most part skirted in Fennell’s adaptation, which swaps the emphatic depiction of British classism in Saltburn for more veiled allusions. Literary purists might say the director is making it more commercially palatable, unlike, say Andrea Arnold’s raw, naturalistic 2011 version, the first to cast Black actors as Heathcliff.

But this is a Valentine’s Day weekend release from a major studio and Fennell is unapologetic about any concessions she makes toward popular tastes. Her take on the novel is that of a transcendent love story, which aims to have as dizzying an effect on its audience as it does on Cathy and Heathcliff. In that, it succeeds, before spiraling into a cautionary tale about denial of the heart’s true longings.

Mr. Earnshaw is capricious — jolly one minute, enraged the next — and Cathy to some degree shares that unpredictable nature. “This’ll be your pet,” her father tells her of Heathcliff, and she takes an instant liking to him. But Cathy can also be cruelly insensitive, notably to her bookish companion Nelly (Hong Chau), the illegitimate daughter of a Lord who paid to have her hidden away. It’s Heathcliff who tells Cathy, “I will never leave you, no matter what you do.” But that vow could just as easily apply to Nelly.

Cathy and Heathcliff get caught in the rain — Fennell is rarely shy about drenching her pretty leads until their clothes are semi-transparent — and when petulant Mr. Earnshaw complains that they have kept him waiting on his birthday, Heathcliff takes the blame. Cathy says nothing about her part in it as she watches through a crack in the door while her father administers a vicious lashing that will leave permanent scars across Heathcliff’s back.

Robbie tackles Cathy’s complexity head on; she’s driven as much by carnal as emotional needs and not averse to the pleasure of power games, at times bordering on sadism. When Heathcliff says he would take any number of beatings to spare her, the faintest trace of a smile on her face speaks volumes.

Fennell knows exactly what she’s doing, creating thirst-trap meme fodder with a shot of smoldering Elordi, I mean Heathcliff, shirtless and sweaty, stacking hay bales. The moment is so close to gay farmer porn I giggled. Cathy certainly takes note, but after her father gambles away what’s left of the family money, she starts mulling a rescue plan.

At first, she’s indignant that their new neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a handsome bachelor with a textiles fortune, has not called on her. Curiosity compels her to spy on him and his infantilized ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) through the windows of their stately home, Thrushcross Grange. But when she sprains her ankle in doing so, she is holed up for six weeks with the Lintons.

That’s more than enough time for Edgar to grow besotted with her and for Cathy to become torn, contemplating the advantages of a man who is not only rich but also kind. Heathcliff seems to intuit her wandering affections, even if her lust hasn’t shifted. “We’re not children anymore, Cathy,” he barks at her. “I cannot play with you.”

In case her oscillation between sex and financial security isn’t clear enough, Fennell has Cathy and Heathcliff peering through the hayloft floorboards at the stable, while the Earnshaws’ manservant Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) has wild sex with the maid, Zillah (Amy Morgan), incorporating such horse tack as stirrups, a bit and a riding crop. This marks quite a change from the deeply religious, judgy Joseph of the novel, even if the sexual kinks are in keeping with the character’s misogyny.

When Heathcliff hears only part of Cathy’s outpouring of doubts to Nelly — the unfortunate part about how marrying someone of his class would degrade her — he bolts. That at least simplifies her decision to marry Edgar, who treats her like royalty. She also gets a new plaything in Isabella, who in Oliver’s droll performance is the kind of posh Brit that could be either a precocious genius or a complete nitwit. In any case, she can be usefully manipulated when necessary.

That time comes when Heathcliff returns, mysteriously moneyed and made over as a gentleman (the swooning of overheated twentysomethings is going to be epic) with a gold tooth or two. The obsession that binds him to Cathy won’t be denied by either of them. Cathy blames everyone but herself for her predicament — mostly Nelly — becoming steadily more unhinged.

There’s a melodramatic grandiosity to much of this, a touch of the overwrought, which you either go with or you don’t. I found it fun, not gonna lie. Fennell shuffles her English lit influences — either by accident or by design — with some scenes playing more like Austen or Dickens. But whatever its flaws or virtues, this movie seems to know exactly what its core audience wants and delivers it with the intensity of tempestuous winds and torrential downpours.

There’s nothing timid or stiflingly tasteful about Fennell’s direction — though there’s nothing terribly fluid about it either. The visual scheme is rooted in the period but flirts with modern times — from Linus Sandgren’s spectacular cinematography through Suzie Davis’ sumptuous production design and Jacqueline Durran’s over-the-top fantasy costumes in eye-searing reds and metallics. And Anthony Willis’ score, intertwined with original songs by Charli xcx, effectively pumps up the romance and the tragedy.

The highly dysfunctional nature of the novel’s central romance is not exactly ignored — both Cathy and Heathcliff engage in reprehensible behavior, particularly the latter in his abusive treatment of Isabella. (A scene with the refrain of “Do you want me to stop?” is straight out of Dangerous Liaisons, replacing “It’s beyond my control.”) But Fennell nonetheless leans into the palpitating hearts, the heaving bosoms and burning loins of what she seems to have decided is The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, not so much the tortured psychology of it. All of which means that your enjoyment of the movie might be impacted by your affection for the novel.

Either way, the leads are captivating and their chemistry sizzles. Robbie (a producer here, as well as on Fennell’s previous films Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) is in full bloom, walking a tightrope between infuriating recklessness and devastating regret. Often, she seems more like Katherina from The Taming of the Shrew than Catherine Earnshaw. But Elordi (the second lead in Saltburn) inarguably is the standout. Even after showing the monstrousness of which Heathcliff is capable, he ensures we still see a broken heartthrob driven by love and madness into the abyss.

Clunes, Oliver and the quietly affecting Latif all nail their characters with brushstrokes ranging from broad to finely detailed. But as is so often the case, it’s Chau who steals every scene, using her character’s stillness and alert gaze to great effect. Like Heathcliff, Nelly is forever stained by the stigma of class, stoking ambiguity as to whether her loyalty to Cathy is forged in love or hate. Conflicted feelings like those might well represent how many people respond to Fennell’s movie.