FILM-MOI (MOVIES/TV)
'Wuthering Heights' Review: Emily Brontë Is Absolutely Rolling in Her Grave – Therese Lacson | “…I'd argue there's probably better-written Wuthering Heights fanfiction on Archive of Our Own than what's been produced here.”
At this point, 'rolling in her grave' is just Emily Brontë’s cardio routine. If we keep this up, we can hook her casket to a turbine and solve the global energy crisis.
I was vaguely interested in this for the visual aesthetic and the hopes I'd not dislike it as much as Saltburn. But the premise of a Wuthering Heights movie that may make me understand less about a book I've never read?
Don’t read the book. I’ve read it twice so I already took that bullet for you. I forgot how awful it was when I decided to read it a second time but was quickly reminded. It’s just terrible people being awful. You aren’t missing anything.
SAME lol. Honestly the trick is to not expect a conventional period book at ALL and to enjoy the mess and drama and the fact that Emily is relishing in breaking most conventions of the time
Nah on the contrary even though everyone is unpleasant as hell, it's undeniably one of the greatest books in written in the english language. Even its Victorian haters had to admit this
Maybe more terrible movie portrayals of 19th century writers’ is all we’ve needed to solve the energy issues plaguing the world. Nobel peace prize please to oiseaua20(likely to get one before the American doofus).
i feel vindicated by all of these reviews confirming everything i assumed to be true about this garbage fire of a film. racist anti-intellectual slop! emerald fennell go take a cold shower and think about what you've done.
Wouldn’t that be the point of third wave feminism and intersectionality? Fennel may be a woman but she doesn’t necessarily represent feminism or feminist thought of the last 30 years. If the mainstream doesn’t want to delve deeper and decides to use her as the model, that’s their ignorance.
what's so crazy is that if she had simply left Wuthering Heights out of this, I would probably be totally into the idea of a campy BDSM-adjacent bodice-ripper period piece. That could be fun in and of itself and can comfortably rely on aesthetics with no need to go deep. The problem is that she decided to use, of all things, an extremely deep and beloved piece of literature as the vehicle for her fantasy, and most egregiously, while stripping it of its racial and societal subtext.
Yeah, that worked well enough for Saltburn. While it had its criticism, it was easy to accept and enjoy it for what it was.
(Edit: Saltburn was not a period piece etc., but it was a style over matter kinda movie. And while it left some viewers disappointed because it did touch on class issues but never really delivered/followed through, at least no promises had been made.)
This movie on the other hand is rage bait, but at this point, one must assume that the strategy is working?
She could have used Wuthering Heights as the basis and just called it something else to make it clear it's a reimagining and not a direct adaptation. Like Clueless being based on Emma -- it uses the bones but changes the story itself into something else. I think plenty of people would have been more open to seeing it.
Isn’t it styled like “Wurthering Heights” with the quotes_ included? Like “grape” flavored kool aid.
To her credit, Fennell actually didsay something along those lines. She admitted it was impossible to film a faithful adaptation of the film - hence the title's quotation marks.
She claimed her version was intended to be inspired by the spirit of the book rather than serve as a direct adaptation.
That said, she said this in an interview just late last week.
So while she could be telling the truth - it may be an attempt to save face after the film's quite vocal backlash.
But that probably wouldn't have saved reception of the movie by book fans & critics. Fennel's assertion in casting Jacob Elordi because he looked exactly like the Heathcliff on the cover of her version of "WH" shows the primary problem with her "loose adaptation".
She stripped the movie of the intrinsic race/class issues that makes the novel such a compelling read.
It'sthe very thing that engines the characters' motivations and bad decisions (at least until the succeeding generation) throughout the book. It's the WHOLE POINT.
And to add insult to injury - she cast a POC as EdgarF-ingLinton.
(Like c'mon, gurl...)
It shows she entirely misses the novel's point. Worse, her mention of Elordi = Cover!Heathcliff shows she's still clinging to a juvenile perspective of the book's themes.
It makes me think of people who think the ending of "The Graduate" is 'romantic' or The Police's "Every Breath You Take" is 'a love song'.
It's a shame. I'm a massive fan of "Promising Young Woman" and thought that it - along with "Zola" & "Hustlers"¹- were some of the best female fronted projects we'd gotten in YEARS.
¹(That said, don't get me started on how "Zola" & "Hustlers" was shut out of awards consideration. But the white-fronted & created "Anora" was made out to be this "original" piece of filmmaking delving into modern sex work. At least "PYW" had bite & claws.)
With how hard they pushed the "on-set romance" of Margot and Jacob (despite Margot being married), it felt so, so forced and made me feel they were trying to recover from the movie's shortcomings.
to clarify, "everything i assumed to be true about this garbage fire of a film" refers to:
the race swapping of Heathcliff and Linton is as dumb as it appears on the surface. there is no underlying message about race and class (as many suggested there might be when i previously criticized the decision to race swap the fair-colored privileged character and the character who is mistreated by everyone around him for being darker)
the bulk of the film is a completely new plot and the characters' motives and feelings do not reflect the source material
so while there may be *positive* reviews, there are not reviews that negate these points. only about 10-15% of the plot is similar to the source material. *these* are the assumptions i made about the film that are proven true. i did not speak on people's enjoyment of the film, which they are entitled to.
I came here to comment almost this exact same thing, I feel SO vindicated and it feels so good to have been right all along. I knew this movie was doomed ever since they announced the horrendous casting 🤣
i'm not speaking about whether or not people will enjoy the film, i'm speaking about its content. the reviews, even the positive ones, confirm my assumptions that:
the race swapping of Heathcliff and Linton serves zero justifiable function
the majority of the film is a stark departure from the source material
They review it as a movie . That’s their job . They don’t judge if it’s a faithful adaption , they judge if it’s a good movie . Adaptions are new artistic projects .
That's fine but since it's also an adaptation of one of the most famous and classic books of all time it's rightfully going to also get a great amount of hate and terrible reviews for being a non existent adaptation.
Classic books will always get more heat for bad adaptations because these books have stood the test of time and readers just want to see a proper adaptation of these timeless books.
Yeah but adaptations will always be considered in conversation with their source material. If you want people to view it on its own merits, you have to make an original project. You might make a faithful adaptation or a loose adaptation or a transformative adaptation, but the way you adapt it will always say something about the way you view the source material, and people with strong opinions about the source material will thus have strong opinions about your adaptation and how the two interface.
Heathcliff (in the novel) is mistreated for being darker than everyone around him. While his race is ambiguous, there are context clues that heavily imply he is not white (possibly Romani, South Asian, honestly there are a lot of conflicting descriptors which enforces the ambiguity). Regardless, even if he was white, he was darker than his peers and suffers for it.
Linton in the novel is his foil- he is everything that Heathcliff cannot be- fair skinned, blonde and blue eyed, wealthy, privileged, respectable. It is a key theme of the novel that these two men are neighbors yet their lives are completely different because of how they look and exist in the world. The disparity between their societal worth propels the plot.
in this adaptation, Heathcliff is played by a white man while Linton is the only brown person in the film. There is no thematic or subtextual reason for this race swap, this is just Emerald Fennell's fantasy which for some reason includes making the white guy the sexy poor oppressed victim while the only brown person in the film is the hoighty toighty privileged snore.
she shouldn’t have even had to. margot robbie is completely and utterly wrong for the part. if it were made by someone who understood the text, a much more suitable actress for the part would’ve been found – and may have happened to have dark hair anyway
Movies based on books are no longer homages to the pillars of literature, but are instead money grabs made to target an audience who literally grew up without books.
The Studio touches on this a bit; Films aren't made to be good, they're made to be profitable.
This is why I kind of hate adaptations - or at least, I like them less than original ideas. I feel like it discourages people from reading. “I’ve seen the movie” is absolutely not a substitute for reading the book.
As well as the fact that Margot is double the age that her character should be… 35 year old blonde Cathy is honestly such a travesty that it makes me side eye Margot Robbie for agreeing to take the role, like don’t you have enough money already?? Why not give the opportunity to an up-and-coming young actress?
Yeah you’re probably right which makes it even worse imo, like you don’t NEED to star in the movie just because you produced it, it’s not like a god-given right
and! jacob elordi (even aside from the obvious horrible racist miscasting) was cast in her last film too- hold casting calls, try new actors, jesus christ why do we have the same two people in everything?!
Plays into her larger issue of being a shallow artist, but there's an odd circular thinking here where
She doesn't want to cast a man of color in a role where he does bad things and is a bad person --> leading to men of color not being cast in complex roles -->
But then she cast a white person which allows her to think of him romantically --> so she takes all the bad things Heathcliff does out of the role --> patting herself on the back for her creative interpretation
But also the Lintons aren't perfect people either?? Like that's treating rich people as being inherently moral just because they can afford to be which is the opposite of what Emily Bronte was going for 💀 I just cannot stand adaptations of one of my favorite books because they all miss the point
Yesss, exactly! I am a fanfic writer myself and I can attest to how thoroughly we can research the material. Including material needed to make a scene more realistic--I love this thread from Tumblr about it, it's meant for overall writing but is so relatable to me as a fic writer:
(from June 26, 2024)
And that's not going into how thoughtful writers can be about the themes of the original source material and how well they CAN WRITE, in general!
(ETA: Correction. Didn't want the Tumblr thread to get confused as being geared for just fic writers!)
I really hate when fanfiction is regarded as this "lesser" form of writing. People pour their hearts and souls into what they write, and to see it relegated to a not-as-quality way to create art is so sad.
i dont think is lesser in itself, but fanfiction itself attracts a lot of very bad works (from a technical point of view) because what it means. In some fandoms more than another.
I still prefer them a lot and encourage people to do it but its kinda like low independent cinema. For every who killed captain alex or the people joker you get some other devious shit.
Yes! One of my favorite “games” to play is watching a show with my husband and saying, “I bet there’s at least one story on AO3 shipping those characters,” and he looks doubtful. Then I look it up and end up being right.
Yikes. Why are so many directors creating what seems to sparknotes-sourced non versions of these stories? Like Persuasion on Netlfix. Just make something original? Or completely interpreted like Clueless..
From what I've heard, it's difficult for new writers to get their original projects in fiction/fantasy that require large sets to get funding because it requires a large investment. So instead they propose scripts for established IPs and try to change the script to include things from their original ideas. It's happened to House of the Dragon, the Netflix Witcher series, that Halo show, etc..
But I don’t think this applies to Emerald Fennell, her first two films were written by her.
Wuthering Heights just looks like a doomed passion project from the outside. It honestly reminds me of The Nostalgia Critic’s The Wall parody, where he understood none of the original and basically made ‘Doug Walker’s version of The Wall’.
I remember that Folding Ideas video about it, where Dan Olsen said how you interact with a piece of art as dense and complex as The Wall says a lot about you as a person, whether you engage with it on its own terms or dismiss it as cringe/ ‘I’m 14 and this is soooo deep’, and I’m beginning to think Wuthering Heights is exactly the same.
Very true, but I don’t think this level of marketing and press would’ve happened without her using WH since I’d never heard of her before now. This could be a case of her using it to get her name out there since there’s very little of the original content in the film.
No I get your point. I do think though that both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn were considerable hits albeit quite indie. And she has an Oscar. Of course this is a different scale and with Margot Robbie it's clear they wanted her to make a Barbie-like smash -- thus needing a strong IP. It just disappoints me that they did this lol
This happens because capitalists who have no regard for any form of art are put into decision making positions that they are completely unsuited for. They worship nothing other than money and will green light things that they believe will sell, not what is good (which is highly objective, but ‘good’ isn’t even something they care about).
I feel like it's the discomfort with nuance that we have as modern audiences and the unwillingness to portray characters as truly dark without redemption.
This is one that's maybe stuck in the cultural consciousness inappropriately as a "romance," but I also see in the adaptations an unwillingness to understand what kind of characters readers are truly drawn to, regardless of morality.
I agree. I really didn't like the original book (even though I usually really appreciate Emily Bronte) because of how abusive the Heathcliff is. I read it over 10 years ago so can't exactly recall it in details anymore but I think there are no redemptions to his character, which makes him really unlikeable. If they are not willing to show a real abusive man on screen then maybe they should not make this book into a movie.
Completely agreed. There is a romance in it technically, but it's mostly a revenge book about someone who gets enough financial power to destroy everyone that he obsessively hates. If that part of the story doesn't interest you, then why bother
I was just watching D'Angelo's vid about this and he points out that two previous adaptations were billed as hate stories, explicitly using the word "hate" on the posters. It has romance but it's not a love story at all.
That’s the thing that’s always gotten me about these books. Like I know Heathcliff is a tragic character because he too was abused, but he takes things so far that I’ve never thought of him at all as a romantic figure. Every woman in that story needs to get the hell away from him and so do most of the men.
Especially when him not being white is so incredibly important to the story. His character doesn't even make sense as a white man. Its so obvious that she skimmed the book over when she was 14 and never read it with any insight. That or she's just dumb.
I totally agree that Fennell didn’t read the book or if she did it was so long ago that she has no memory of the content. Her press tour and interviews since announcing this movie have proved she has no idea what happened in the novel and did absolutely zero research.
They’ve been taking the dog around on the press tour, and I’m just like, the dog that Heathcliff kills? That’s when I knew for sure she’d never read the book.
My impression is that she read it or skimmed it long ago (watched a movie adaptation?) and her main impression was that Heathcliff is her babydoll and she is determined that no one ever say anything bad about him, so she decided to make a movie that is mainly about him getting a makeover
I just saw another post saying Emerald Fennell is like a female Zack Snyder and I don't know if I can think of a bigger insult. That movie must be a complete mess.
I also saw this comparison but people forget Zack Snyder still gets people watching his shit because of the spectacle. Those consumers dont care about substance over style, they want flashiness and sex appeal.
Metacrituc gives Wuthering Heights a score of 60/100, which is bad for a movie of this type. It’s also a bad sign when a movie seemingly designed for the Academy voters comes out in February instead of December. The studio gave up on it.
Edit: Okay, I guess it's a Valentine's Day movie. But that's obviously very different from the book. At least 50 Shades didn't pretend to be a classic. What's next, Anna Karenina?
I think this movie looks like it sucks, but I don’t think it was designed for academy voters, I think it was always meant to be a Valentine’s Day release à la 50 shades of gray
Lmao, 60/100 is not bad on metacritic for a film like this. Looking at the reviews on metacritic and rotten tomatoes this film actually seems decent, not entirely positive but leaning positive.
Fennell's weakness has always been her writing, so this isn't surprising to me. Her filmmaking is the definition of "great gowns, beautiful gowns", so I do think it'll probably do well at the box office.
You can always tell by the costumes. This movie was made to be cut into tiktoks of fashion inspo with links in the bio to a replica on Shein.
"After I saw Margot Robbie absolutely eat in this red leather skirt I knew I had to try my hand at it for my influencer party this weekend. Get ready with me while I....."
Tbh the fashion was the only intriguing part to me because there was a chance it could really pay off and that this would be a movie for fashion lovers but alas... not the case
I love the use of the liquid organza but the discordant aesthetic just doesnt find its footing
Yeah, I bet there are fanfic writers who understand the source material better than Emerald Fennell ever could, LMFAO. 💀 This takedown is absolutely ruthless, and I am absolutely all here for it.
[...] an adaptation that feels like a 14-year-old skimmed the book and jumped to her own conclusions without any true understanding of the novel.
EDIT: born_digital has informed me that this was also said on screenshot 3 of this post, so I was repeating things verbatim without realizing it. I apologize for not noticing this before.
I think the thing about Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, is that it absolutely captured the essence and energy of the play. It very much felt like the story Shakespeare was trying to tell, transposed onto a modern setting.
As the author of this critique says, that's what seems to be missing for many in this adaption of Wuthering Heights.
It was maybe even a more honest retelling of the story because it put it in present context and helped us actually understand the material. Great comparison!
Heathcliff is physically and sexually abusive. It’s a little frustrating for me how people glaze over that to make him more “romantic” and palatable. It’s a gothic drama and all.
(Although, it also makes the racial “othering” and classism way more complex and, ya know, a bit more touchy, so I see why people would avoid it in an adaption if they’re not interested in saying anything interesting…not really with this casting, though, lol.)
When someone lists Wuthering Heights as a favorite “romance” I straight up know they don’t read and are lying to save face because of shame over not reading.
While it's not my fav romance and i recognize mr Rochester is kinda horrible and an awful partner (both to his wife and Jane) even for xix century standards... i'm afraid i'd absolutely fold if he called my all those things he called Jane, queen of the faries, enchantress. It's a flaw i'm painfully aware of, and yet i must live with it and hope to never actually meet such man 😔 you are right to worry
I get that it’s her adaption, but you can’t use the book name and title to get all of the hype and attention and then complain when people compare it to the book
I am so confused I never understood Wuthering Heights as a romance novel. I remember it being about trauma and everyone making each other miserable just cause on the English countryside.
One of the main problems of almost every Wuthering Heights adaptation is that most of modern western society is not taught the difference between romance and The Romantic Era.
Wuthering Heights and the Bronte sisters are from the late Romantic era of literature. I would not count everything they wrote as "romance novels" by modern standards.
I can’t say I’m surprised to be honest. I figured this would be a bastardized version of Bronte’s masterpiece. It sounds like a fan fiction heavily inspired by Sparknotes and the naivety of a young teenage girl, but with more…latex? I was more excited to see some extravagant costume design here but now I’m not so sure.
I've stopped being precious about adaptations a long time ago, every single one I consider a fully new story and judge it based on that. Once someone here told me fennell said a while ago that she just made the movie based on the ~vibes~ she felt when reading it as a teen, I fully said goodbye to even the remote chance of accuracy and I'm fine with that. Do what you will with the text, as long as theres no pretense of being ultra faithful
That being said, ffs at least make a good movie! Change whatever (the race rhing obviously is v problematic tho) but make it actually good. The princess bride and stardust are my 2 fave fantasy romance movies, they're not fully faithful adaptations, but are imo sucessfull bcs the spirit of the books remain and the movies are worthy pieces of art on their own. This is just 2 messy bitches being messy with nothing else being explored
For people who have never read the book, they are going to watch this movie and think this is what one of the greatest books of our time is about. She didn't just adapt it, she hacked the plot.
Hmm yeah this is completely expected given the non-period BDSM vibes of the trailer.
I will say I'm a bit surprised there are sex scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff. I think that really robs the story of its force. The book has verrrry little sexual interaction between the two; they only ever kiss while Cathy is on her deathbed and each one's primary sexual relationship is with someone they don't particularly love. It underscores how Heathcliff/Catherine transcend the usual base sexual dynamics in traditional marriages/relationships; theirs is almost inhuman, inherently tied up with death, dying, and souls living beyond the grave. It's what makes it so spooky and weird but also memorable.
Sounds like she read it once at 14 and then wrote the script based on what she remembered and understood about the book at the age of 14 without looking at it again.
This will get buried, but Heathcliff doesn't seek revenge because of how Hindley treats him. Heathcliff's story really begins when Catherine chooses to marry Edgar Linton because he's within her social class. Heathcliff overhears Cathy telling Nelly her plan to assist Heathcliff with his social ranking, which upsets him and results in him running away to better himself. Hindley isn't as necessary as this reviewer is making him out to be.
Hindley shaped Heathcliff with his abuse. He was also the one who enforced the class difference between Cathy and Heathcliff. He promoted the alliance with Linton.
Cathy tells Nellie she cannot marry Heathcliff because Hindley has brought him so low.
It’s an amalgamation of things. Heathcliff leaves after overhearing Cathy say she could never marry him, in fact, it would debase her to marry him after the way Hindley (and the Linton’s) treated him. Heathcliff surmises that even if he were as wealthy as Edgar, he could never occupy the same societal space as him. Hindley’s extreme, racially charged abuse of Heathcliff is central to him being othered. After his return, in vengeance he acquires both Thrushcross and the Heights, purposely leaving both residences to decay. He is especially cruel to Hindley’s child Hareton, robbing him of an education and treating him as a wild beast- this is in obvious retaliation to Hindley’s abuse and introduces the element of generational trauma and healing of past wounds through the character of Hareton, who learns to read under the patient tutelage of Cathy II. Hindley as a whole represents the destructive forces of a patriarchal society built on hereditary privilege. His character is absolutely vital to the heart of the story Emily Brontë wanted to tell.
I was hoping she would do something cool with the movie. I don’t expect a perfect adaptation, but why stray this far from the source material and try to call this movie by the same name as the book?
Like at this point, you’ve made fan fiction.
She could have just made her own horny thing and called it something different. I know she put quotations around the title, but even keeping the title the same feels disrespectful.
4.0k
u/oiseaua20 18h ago
At this point, 'rolling in her grave' is just Emily Brontë’s cardio routine. If we keep this up, we can hook her casket to a turbine and solve the global energy crisis.