Wuthering Heights Review

The casting row arrived a year before the film did, over two leads visibly a decade too old for the roles and a Heathcliff who bears no relation to the one on the page, and Fennell's answer was to double down on sensation. Linus Sandgren shot it on 35mm and VistaVision and it is genuinely beautiful: skies that look bruised, interiors lit to a single candle, a moor that behaves like weather rather than scenery. Anthony Willis scores it straight while Charli XCX's songs, House first among them, drop over the top with no interest in the period at all. When the two registers collide the film has real charge.

What it does not have is the book's cruelty. Bronte's novel is a long account of damage passed down a generation, and this version treats Heathcliff and Catherine as an appetite rather than a wound, which makes the second half a sequence of escalations with nothing underneath. Robbie is committed and often very good in the early scenes. Elordi is asked to smoulder rather than act. Hong Chau, as Nelly Dean, is the only person on screen behaving as though a story is being told to somebody.

Critics split hard. David Sims called it a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time, Peter Bradshaw called it an emotionally hollow bodice ripping misfire, and the aggregate settled around the middle fifties on both major sites. Audiences went anyway: two hundred and forty million dollars on an eighty million dollar budget. It is a film worth arguing about and not one worth defending.