Just Think of Wuthering Heights as a Barbie Offshoot

Emily Brontë’s novel deserves a more sophisticated approach than Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Still from Wuthering Heights. (Warner Bros.)


By the time you actually see Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, if you wind up committing that mad act, you might be surprised at how you’ve exhausted the strength of your scorn on the previews. They played relentlessly for months before the film’s premiere and were so stupendously silly that, if you’d read Emily Brontë’s novel, you discovered how high your eyebrows could actually rise on your forehead in registering poleaxed disapproval.

But it’s hard to keep that kind of raging disdain going. A weary cynicism overtakes it that is the only way to cope with the Emerald Fennells of the world.

At age forty, she has the sensibility of a horny, giggling fourteen-year-old, so her Wuthering Heights is exactly what such a case of arrested development would produce. Fennell’s on record as wanting to honor her first titillated reading of the novel at age fourteen. So hotties Heathcliff and Cathy, when not stiffly playing dress-up in a series of absurd costumes meant to represent old-timey people of no specific period, shag their way across the moors to the tunes of Charli XCX.

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