Review: Condensed ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a unsatisfying adaptation

With three films now under her belt, the auteurist obsessions of English writer/director Emerald Fennell are becoming obvious, even though she’s not particularly subtle about her cinematic proclivities. In fact, her latest film, an “adaptation” of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights,” opens with a direct acknowledgment of her own tendency to eroticize death.

We hear it first: groaning, wood squeaking, a kind of climax. As the picture comes up, we discover these sounds are not sexual in nature, but the noises coming from a man publicly hanged, a spectacle that sends the crowd, including a young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), into an ecstatic frenzy.

The hanging represents a kind of barbaric sensuality that will tempt Cathy over the course of her life, particularly in her relationship with her adopted brother Heathcliff, a wretch from Liverpool (Owen Cooper) who grows into a strapping, rough, alluring young man (Jacob Elordi), who smolders intensely in the direction of the lovely, but still petulant, adult Cathy (Margot Robbie).

Forbidden, abject desire is the main theme that Fennell draws out from Brontë’s sprawling, tempestuous (and much adapted) novel, which she has abridged, condensed and elaborated upon to her own specific ends. It’s almost a fan fiction of sorts, as Fennell explores and experiments with the characters and story while inserting some daringly kinky sex.

Strange then, that “Wuthering Heights” feels so unsatisfying.

Fennell boldly goes places the novel does not, but like her previous two films — “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn” — it just adds up to a lot of empty provocation, without much to motivate or undergird this performative naughtiness. The film could use the boning of a good corset, pulled taut. Instead, it all feels a bit messy.

But Fennell loves mess. Cathy pranks and teases long-suffering Heathcliff, leaving eggs in his bed (he curiously fingers the yolks). When she experiences a sexual awakening with him while spying on a pair of servants in the barn, suddenly everything takes on a new texture, in which Fennell, the director, delights: a snail trail of slime on a window pane; bread dough as moist and manhandled as human flesh.

Propelled by poverty and class consciousness, Cathy throws herself at a wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and finds herself trapped in an over-designed gilded cage, in an estate where the floors are painted blood red and the mantlepiece crawls with white plaster hands. Heathcliff disappears before returning with a moneyed glow-up, setting Cathy’s heart aflutter once again.

It’s a real friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers tale.

But while there are a few memorably lusty moments — Elordi lifting Robbie by the corset strings is a thrill — and plenty of tightly bound bosom heaving, in general, Fennell overpromises and under-delivers on the sex in “Wuthering Heights.” She tries in vain to get her freak on, but most of the Cathy/Heathcliff stuff is too vanilla to get pulses racing, despite all their horny rain-soaked torment.

Robbie’s movie star charisma and stunning costumes by Jacqueline Durran make her the visual centerpiece of the film, but Elordi proves to be the necessary grounding force. As in his Oscar-nominated performance in “Frankenstein,” Elordi palpably sells Heathcliff’s anguish: his heartache at Cathy’s rejection, his insecurity, the cruelty he clings to as revenge.

In this playfully anachronistic version, Fennell puts forth some intriguing ideas and intoxicating cinematic images, but never manages to achieve a firm grasp on the tone of her “Wuthering Heights,” which whips like a loose skirt in the breeze, see-sawing between earnestness and arch, over-stylized melodrama.

The surface pleasures of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” may be plenty, but the story itself, well, it never achieves climax.

2 stars out of 4

Rated: R for sexual content, some violent content and language.

Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes.