'Wuthering Heights' Review: Margot Robbie, Amok on the Moors

For her shiny new take on "Wuthering Heights," writer-director Emerald Fennell drenches the screen in torrential rain, fills it with pantomimes of passion and tries hard to compete with Emily Brontë. What a mistake! The film uses the novel’s famous first half, opening with two children, Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) and Nelly (Vy Nguyen), watching a public hanging that introduces Fennell’s blunt linkage of sex and death.

When the enigmatic stray Heathcliff arrives, Nelly is sidelined; the adult Nelly (Hong Chau) becomes a bookish, peevish companion, and Fennell replaces Catherine’s brother with her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), a shift that attenuates the novel’s incest theme.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are more persuasive apart than when together, and Fennell piles on color, literalism, surreal touches and anachronisms while leaning on production design and costumes to telegraph her ideas.

wuthering heights, margot robbie, emerald fennell, jacob elordi, heathcliff, emily brontë, hong chau, martin clunes, anachronisms, production design