“Wuthering Heights”

Yet for all the big swings, Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" amounts to something oddly shallow and blunt: garish and stylized fan fiction with the scope and budget of an old-school Hollywood epic. In these sex-deprived times at the cinema, if some corset kink, power games and smoldering star power from two genetically blessed Australians is what you're looking for, "Wuthering Heights" might just satisfy that big-screen itch, but the surreal, pop art choices are often more distracting than additive.

Not much inspired from the novel, Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi starrer film draws a fine line between a love story and an erotica.

Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Emily Brontë's groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date—a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. Fennell has streamlined the book's narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages.

A phenomenally loose adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights is eye‑wateringly beautiful to look at and sounds exquisite but is ultimately rather hollow. For all the sweaty couplings in the film, Wuthering Heights is strangely without heat. Even if you remove Brontë from the mix, the tragedy of Wuthering Heights is, it does not stand very well on its own.

Wuthering Heights doesn't have the live-ammo impact of Fennell's earlier films Saltburn and Promising Young Woman or, indeed, Andrea Arnold's flawed, brilliant, primitivist take on Brontë's novel from 2011, which really did believe in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff's love. For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It's quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.

Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' is attuned to our present moment, in which shock and awe undermine history, fashion prevails over depth, and the moody score threatens to overwhelm the foreground. It is a film made for the age of TikTok and Instagram, a movie composed for the algorithm, with flashy and catchy images but little substance.