High-shine gowns. A bedroom wall accented with veins and freckles. Large strawberries on the lawn. Touching the bright orange yolk of raw eggs. Wetness, everywhere.
Any mold that “Wuthering Heights” might have been anticipated to fit in is disarmingly shattered by Emerald Fennell’s interpretation of a great love gone horribly wrong.
Marking the third producing collaboration between Fennell and Margot Robbie, the film maintains the spirit of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel while being shaped around the director’s own experience with the classic. The result is an intentionally crafted romance for true yearners and defenders of the “friends-to-lovers toxic love” trope.
The Valentine’s Day release is a glaring red warning about the perils of intense love marred by dependence and levels of possessiveness that, admittedly, are entertaining, but only on the big screen.
“They torture each other, and they torture themselves, and they love each other, and they hate themselves,” said Robbie in a Warner Bros. roundtable. “It’s why this whole relationship is so intoxicating to watch, read or immerse yourself in as an actor.”
“Wuthering Heights” is both the title of the film and the estate where Catherine Earnshaw (Robbie), a free-spirited and reckless heir, takes in Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), a servant neglected to live in the stables. The two characters remain cemented in each other from the moment that young Cathy carves “C+H” in the Yorkshire moors, a sweeping landscape where they escape into their untamed fantasies of pure lust. More than being a critical setting, the moors become witness to their constant return to each other and insatiable longing.
Robbie portrays Catherine Earnshaw as childishly lovable and depicts her puppy love-turned-painful obsession for Heathcliff, whom she claims ownership over after naming him. Although the character is designed to be wholly unlikable, Robbie’s exuberance of charm and prior roles have the audience rooting for her character’s ambitions to have it all, no matter the cost.
“I love playing a character who affects the circumstances, as opposed to someone who has things happen to them,” said Robbie. “They’re kind of the agents of their own fate in this story, and it’s more interesting to play that.”
Cathy relishes Heathcliff’s acts of undying protection, from covering her eyes from the rain and carrying her with only one arm, and tests the limits of the pain he is willing to absorb when she marries Edward Linton (Shazad Latif) and leaves for Thrushcross Grange. The new setting that Catherine finds herself in is glittered with excess opulence in clothing, food, decoration and shine, but is also symbolic of the containment she so adamantly opposes, with fish sealed in vases and ice and an identical dollhouse replica of what her life should look like.
After six weeks, she returns to Wuthering Heights visibly transformed and with an enduring fixation on Heathcliff. Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran utilizes skin-tight corsets and shiny velvet skirts as a front to signify a status shift that masks her infantile foolishness. In her red coat, Catherine stands out sore in the weathered-down, beaten and dim place that she used to call home. After Heathcliff purchases the estate, it becomes a dark torture chamber reflective of his inner turmoil and the pain he inflicts with dog collars, chains and whips lined on the walls.
As Heathcliff, Elordi demonstrates an unquenchable thirst for her at the forefront while maintaining Heathcliff’s anguish masked as blind revenge. His character’s infatuation with shielding and remaining close to Cathy shapes his whole identity, even minimizing himself to being a dog willing to follow her to the end of the world.
Their stimulating attraction to each other is utilized by both characters as psychological warfare to submit the other to their bidding, most especially after their long-awaited reunion and a kiss that damns them both.
While Catherine uses Edgar to sexually provoke Heathcliff, his desire for her is manifested in the most provocative scenes, where he licks her tears and urges her to secretly meet in the carriage, the moors and the garden.
Charli XCX’s “Chains of Love” adds an intense auditory sensation to the montage of Catherine and Heathcliff in their most feral and fierce acts of intimacy while also hinting at the pending devastation that is to come.
What remains constant throughout “Wuthering Heights” is the intense presence of the color red, a thematic choice to continuously depict the impassioned and fiery romance between the ill-fated characters.
“It’s the blood that pumps through the heart, and his blood, to him, is Cathy’s blood,” said Elordi during the roundtable. “They share a heart.”
From the red curtains, walls, floors, dresses and sunsets, the color illustrates how their love impacts their surroundings and every character in insurmountable ways. While their story begins and ends with each other, what persists is betrayal, destruction and grief for a love that wasn’t meant to endure.
“When I watched the film, the overwhelming feeling I had was regret,” said Elordi. “From all the characters, moments missed and then regretting it for the rest of your life.”