In Dying for You, Charli XCX sings, 'cause you're the poison I drink, I drink you twice to be sure.' The song appears on her new album, Wuthering Heights, and was written for Emerald Fennell's screen adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel about the toxic love between Catherine (Margot Robbie) and her father's ward, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). Fennell's adaptation, styled Wuthering Heights in quotation marks to indicate it is not a strict interpretation of the gothic text, was inspired by the profound connection she felt to the book as a teenager. With the film, she wanted to make something that was the book she experienced at age 14.
A Teenage Fantasy of Ruinous Love
Mission accomplished. Fennell's version of the classic story feels exactly like the kind of ruinous love someone would ruminate in their childhood bedroom while listening to angsty music, imagining that romantic love must hurt to be real. Put another way, Fennell purposefully sets aside some of the story's larger themes of gender, class, and race to distill it into one of childhood infatuation that evolves into adult devastation.
The result is that viewers seeking a straightforward adaptation of the book are sure to be disappointed, especially since it ignores over half of the source material. However, if you are open to a cinematic experience that feels like an amorous 14-year-old's fever dream about a disastrous love story full of irreverent longing, symbolized through viscous objects like egg yolks and gelatinous fish mouths, then this is the movie for you. Like such a dream, it is visceral, hard to look away from, and makes you feel everything.
Setting the Tone
Fennell makes no attempt to hide her approach. Hence, the title's quotation marks are felt before the first image appears on screen. The movie opens with moans and grunts. At first, it sounds like sex, but the scene reveals a man being hanged in front of a crowd. As his neck snaps, the crowd becomes titillated by his visible erection. This moment, which subverts audience expectations by juxtaposing the horrible and the horny, immediately sets the film's tone.
Although this scene appears nowhere in the book, it reminds me of the novel's opening page, where Heathcliff's estate on the cold, windswept Yorkshire Moors is paradoxically referred to as a 'misanthropist's Heaven.' It is a fitting description for both the opening scene and the poisonous love story about to unfold.
The Toxic Bond
Cathy and Heathcliff meet as children when her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), takes him in as a random act of charity. Together, they suffer the abuse of the drunk and erratic man, mistaking their clinging to each other for survival as a connection. The pull between them becomes even more complicated once they are older, and Heathcliff can use one hand to lift her by the corset to his lips, making the sexual undercurrent explicit.
However, the chemistry between Cathy and Heathcliff is no match for the reality of poverty. After Mr. Earnshaw drains the household coffers, Cathy is compelled to accept the marriage proposal of her wealthy neighbor, Edgar (Shazad Latif). Even though she knows she loves Heathcliff, she cannot 'degrade' herself by marrying him. In response, Heathcliff rushes away from Wuthering Heights on horseback and disappears for five years.
A Torrid Affair
While he is gone, Cathy moves into the lavish and anachronistically stylized estate next door, where she passes time with Edgar's sister, Isabella (Alison Oliver), and her childhood companion, Nelly (Hong Chau). Eventually, Heathcliff returns as a wealthy man, with a gold tooth and gold earring to prove it, and Cathy can satisfy her longing. She begins a torrid affair, proving to both Heathcliff and herself that, as Charli XCX sings, he is the 'gun to my head,' 'wound to my chest,' and 'favorite jewelry worn just like a noose 'round my neck.' From here, there is Heathcliff's mutually manipulative marriage to Isabella and Nelly's traitorous act to ensure the ending is never in question: Cathy will die, leaving Heathcliff unmoored.
That death results directly from the ugly ways the people in this story treat each other, but there was never any pretense that this eventual cruelty would not come to pass. Cathy cannot escape the storm of Heathcliff, and he will always be left begging on his knees for her to 'please rub the salt in my wounds.'
A Captivating Gothic Melodrama
By the time the gothic melodrama ends, the movie is everything Fennell promised. From the hauntingly grotesque chemistry between Robbie and Elordi to Charli XCX's anguished songs, Linus Sandgren's sweeping cinematography, Suzie Davies' unsettlingly unrestrained production design, and Jacqueline Durran's bold, fantastical costumes, the story feels as heightened as any 14-year-old's imagination. Ultimately, it is unnerving, overly dramatic, incredibly horny, and a reminder that a toxic love like Cathy and Heathcliff's was never intended to be romantic; it was intended to be captivating. Fennell's adaptation and Robbie and Elordi's performances ensure this holds true. Wuthering Heights is now streaming on HBO Max.
