Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wuthering Heights’ on VOD, an extremely horny riff on a literary classic starring Margot Robbie and Jason Elordi

So are we drinking the Wuthering Heights (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) bathwater, or are we scowling at it in disgust? That’s the question of the day, my friends. Hot-button filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s third provocative outing after Saltburn and Promising Young Woman is a version of Emily Bronte’s 1847 all-timer of an English novel, albeit stripped down to bare bones covered in sweaty goosepimples. Fennell famously turned down $150 million from Netflix and took $80 million from Warner Bros. so the film could enjoy theatrical release, and the gamble worked – it was a $250-plus million worldwide hit, and its damp, soupy atmospherics (I’m guessing about $60 million of that budget went towards fog machines) and lush photography look even more stunning on a big screen. Oh, and so do its stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, who lick each other up and down more than I remember from the novel. Not that I remember much. It’s been a while. And that’s probably for the better in this case.

The Gist: A dark screen. Moaning. Creaking. They both intensify. Oh boy. We’re really showing up in medias res here, aren’t we? Yep: Those noises are of a man dying on the noose. Lookit that – YOU just got FUCKED WITH! You dirty-minded so-and-so! And this poor feller met his miserable end in front of a rabid throng of people quick to point out that he died with a boner. You can’t not see it. It’s right there. If he wasn’t dead already, he’d wish he was. We see a nun with a beet-red face in the audience, and she’s deeply offended by that. Not the gruesome death, mind you, but the other thing. I think for people of her ideology, especially here in the early 19th century (and maybe even now, for some) the top three sinful affronts to clean Christian living are, in order of disgustingness, the female body, the male body and murder. I mean, there are children watching this public execution! They shouldn’t be seeing a penis-lump beneath a pair of pants! This is a family deathwatch! And now everybody in attendance is all hot and horny. There are folks tongue-kissing in the streets, or putting their hands down each other’s pants. SINNERS!

Judging from That Look on her young face, the scene functions as a sexual awakening for Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington). She just saw some shit. It’s not something she’ll easily forget. Back home at the upper-middle-class family farm, dubbed Wuthering Heights, her father (Martin Clunes) stumbles home like the drunkard he is. He’s not alone – he picked up a nameless street urchin that he offers to Cathy as her “pet.” She names him Heathcliff (Owen Cooper, breakthrough star of Netflix’s Adolescence), after her dead brother. He can’t read and has wounds on his head that make him look like someone sawed off his devil horns. And he and Cathy become the absolute best of friends.

Years pass. Cathy and Heathcliff are adults played by Robbie and Elordi now. And Wuthering Heights is going to pot thanks to Mr. Earnshaw, who’s guzzled and gambled away the family fortune. Cathy is a spirited, gently entitled young woman and Heathcliff looks like someone carved him out of oak to be an extra in Fight Club. When he isn’t working up an excessive body drip while tossing hay – yep, Cathy sneaks a peek – the two of them gallivant through the windswept, foggy moors and admire the robust scenery, and sometimes even the landscapes. It rains a lot here. Have I mentioned that yet? Well, it does. All the better to make these sexy fleshwads extra damp. One time she’s out there by herself with her hand up her skirt, working out a bit of pent-up frustration, and Heathcliff sees her. The resulting maddening exchange results in Cathy hiding eggs in Heathcliff’s bed, and when he sits on them and makes a mess, he doesn’t clean it up. No, this being an Emerald Fennell movie, he fingers the glop like he’s horny for the frittata between Cathy’s thighs. Which he obviously is.

The state of the estate is dire. But hope arrives with the new neighbors moving into nearby Thrushcross Grange. They’re wealthy: Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) would make a great suitor for any available ladies nearby, and his younger sister Isabella (Alison Oliver), with her propensity for stealing hair off Cathy’s brush so she can make a creepy doll version of her, would be someone wholly worthy of passive-aggressive avoidance. And so Cathy’s torn between the lavish lifestyle and tragic missionary positions of Linton, and probable pauperdom and multiple Big Os in one go with Heathcliff. Cathy’s handmaiden Nelly (Hong Chau) encourages and engineers the former, and off goes Heathcliff into the night. Cathy settles for the dissatisfying thrusts at Thrushcross and wears savagely gorgeous gowns, and all that, and it ain’t too bad. But you know what’d be worse? If the Prodigal Love Truncheon returned after a few years, even more handsome and rakish than before, and with enough money to buy Wuthering Heights. Well, shit.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Different Bronte sister, but Cary Fukunaga’s spooky, horror-coded 2011 take on Jane Eyre is highly memroable. And Sophia Coppola is a clear influence – see the many brilliantly styled anachronisms in Marie Antionette. 

Performance Worth Watching: Of course Elordi and Robbie are magnetic, even in underwritten roles. But what a movie like this needs, and gets, is a weird little wacko supporting character who steals scenes like Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, and we get one in Oliver’s hilarious, screw-loose characterization of Isabella, whose every display of lovely decoupage inevitably looks like engorged human genitalia. Crafty girl, this one.

Sex And Skin: Buckets of it, although we see no bits, butts or boobs. 

Our Take: So: Are we slurping up Wuthering Heights or not? A little. Not heartily mind you, but Fennell heats up a frothy concoction that’s worth some sips, especially if you’re not a traditionalist potentially upset by significant alterations of the source material. Personally, I care not for authenticity of adaptation, and admire the audacity of Fennell’s interpretation, which indulges sloppy pig slaughter, big oozy snails leaving trails on windows, the slapping-flesh sounds of bread dough being kneaded, a pile of pink hairless pig’s feet that look like dicks, a couple instances of BDSM, a soundtrack heavy with Charli XCX, and the walls of Cathy’s bedroom at the Linton mansion, which are pink with freckles and delicately veiny, modeled after her luminescent skin. Fennell has never been afraid of getting fetishy with her films, but Wuthering Heights takes the cake and smashes it on everybody’s tits. So to speak.

This is Fennell feeding Masterpiece Theatre or Merchant-Ivory into the meat grinder. This is no stodgy period piece bursting with repressed yearning. Its throb ‘n’ heave is considerable, even if its horniness is somewhat restrained at times, a few hairs shy of going over the top. Of course, it’s still ridiculous, a story set in a universe where logic is less than nil and passion is all, and narrative and thematic sloppiness is a byproduct most of us can deal with, in the context of the director’s robust and sensual visual aesthetic. (What’s the movie “about”? Death, sex and weather, in the broadest terms.) This is absolutely gorgeous trash, Fennell roping us in with meticulous and rigorously conceptualized eye candy and rubbing our face in egg yolks, pig’s blood and assorted varieties of mucus or mucus-adjacent substances. 

You likely know the basic what-happens of the Wuthering plot, but not the how, and within that margin Fennell gets playful, gross, lusty and funny. There’s absolutely no way you’ll take a single second of this seriously; it’s sexual obsession transformed into a sort of deranged comedy, intentional or otherwise, and Elordi and Robbie, faced with sketchy and uninspired renderings of their characters, lean heavily into their ability to explode screens with concupiscence. Try as I might, I can’t argue against that. 

The punkish lack of respect for classical English lit means you won’t likely feel emotionally involved enough to sense the depths of Cathy and Heathcliff’s pain, considering how much thematic barley this movie harvests from skin. Just skin. Skin everywhere – beading up, blushing pink, scarred and bleeding, on faces and bosoms and backs, even the damn walls around this joint. (You might actually wish it went a little farther here in the era of best picture Oscar nominee The Substance.) Wuthering Heights is all blood, sweat and tears, but unlike Saltburn, no semen, surprisingly. Progress? Or regression? Yeah, no. Sure? Maybe. You tell me. Inevitably, the liquids run low, and the film doesn’t end, it just slowly bleeds out, like a hog with its throat slashed. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what Fennell does to the source material. But so fucking what?

Our Call: Wuthering Heights, wuthering blights on traditional literature. Approach it like it’s a very expensive soap opera and you’ll have a pretty damn good time. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.