In the wild, windswept moors of Yorkshire, where passion burns hotter than reason and class divides like jagged stone, two souls collide in a forbidden, all-consuming fire.

Wuthering Heights MINI Review

Emily Brontë, who wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847, was a homeschooled shut-in who died at 30, having never had a single suitor… and, if the book is anything like the film, that’s not surprising.

Wuthering Heights is an infantile girl’s concept of romance, in which people’s base passions are both the force that draws them together and a substitute for depth and experience. It’s a movie in which being aroused is a justification for any behavior, no matter how cruel or immoral. That shallow depravity might be sufficient to make Wuthering Heights a box office success for women who fantasize about sexual brutality and lustful gazes from cruel men, but it’s not sufficient to sustain over two hours of film.

No one can deny Saltburn director Emerald Fennel’s visual flair. The only true bright spot in the film is Fennel’s almost Tim Burton-esque visual style, with large, brutally monochromatic interiors and harsh, dreary exteriors that seem to end at the horizon—giving the world a slightly off-center 2-dimensionality that evokes the covers of cheap romance novels. It’s beautiful and harsh and transportative.

Unfortunately, what’s meant to be the film’s creamy center is hollow, raspy, and repetitive. Fennel dips her pen in the same narrative well in scene after scene, giving us the slightest variations on a singular theme, driven home without protection or genuine passion.

Margot Robbie, who anyone who has seen I, Tonya can tell you is a brilliant actress whose talent is often eclipsed by her Barbie doll looks, and Wolf of Wall Street, Hollywood intro, gives a powerfully present performance that far exceeds anything the script suggests. However, rather than elevating the film, her emotive brilliance shines a 60,000-lumen spotlight on her co-star, Jacob Elordi’s shortcomings.

Elordi, who made a name for himself as the lumbering animated corpse in last year’s surprise streaming hit, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, was apparently not acting in that film. In Wuthering Heights, he evinces all the passion and subtext of a turnip as his Heathcliffe quickly descends from jilted would-be lover to a depraved torturer of mentally handicapped women. His flat and weak delivery, which sounds uncannily like the ogres in Warcraft II, sucks the life from every scene.

What dooms Wuthering Heights is its utter lack of moral or emotional anchoring. The characters played by Robbie and Elordi are not tragic, misunderstood figures; they are unredeemable narcissists—cruel, selfish, and fundamentally loathsome people whose every action is driven by appetite rather than conviction. The film nonetheless insists the audience root for them, offering no path to empathy beyond raw arousal. Deprived of reflection or meaningful growth, their suffering fails to move or instruct. They don’t invite identification; they invite distance, and any misery that befalls them feels not tragic but earned.

In the end, Wuthering Heights mistakes excess for intensity and cruelty for complexity, asking the audience to confuse obsession with love and degradation with passion. Fennel dresses the material in striking visuals, and Robbie pours genuine effort into a role that deserves a better partner, but no amount of style or performance can compensate for a story so emotionally barren and morally juvenile. What remains is a hollow exercise in aestheticized misery—beautiful to look at, exhausting to endure, and utterly unconvincing as either romance or tragedy.

WOKE REPORT

DEItarded

• Set in late 1700s England, the one scene set in town is filled with a comedic level of artificial diversity.
  • It’s one scene, and a short one at that, so it didn’t move the needle much on the Woke-O-Meter.
• Nelly Dean is played by Hong Chau
  • Based on the film’s setting, Dean, played by an Asian, is distracting and silly, but narratively, it doesn’t affect anything. It’s a relatively small role. That’s why the Woke-O-Meter isn’t marked down much.