‘Wuthering Heights’ Review: Margot Robbie, Amok on the Moors

Emerald Fennell’s new film drenches the screen in torrential rain and pantomimes of passion, offering a florid, overstuffed take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, the adaptation embraces literalism, surreal touches and anachronisms as it tries to bridge past and present, announcing its own authorship with stylized flourish.

Fennell confines the story to the novel’s famous first volume and opens on two children watching a public hanging, a sequence that bluntly links sex and death. Once Heathcliff appears, the film shifts from the rough play of the youngsters to Robbie’s Catherine and Elordi’s lavishly hirsute Heathcliff racing across the moors.

Much of the film’s argument is carried by production design and costumes—the Heights manor’s lustrous black exterior reads like a rock face pressing through its walls. Some familiar elements are trimmed or altered: Nelly survives as a character but is reduced largely to a companion, and Mr.

wuthering heights, margot robbie, jacob elordi, emerald fennell, emily brontë, moors, heathcliff, catherine, production design, costumes