“Wuthering Heights”

“You may be left wondering as the Emily Brontë classic about an obsessive-destructive love and hate relationship is repurposed as an overwrought, oversexualised, oversimplified Valentine's Day release. Instead, Fennell is focused on shocking, titillating, obsessing with textures and surfaces and liquids, and impressing with the film's unquestionably visual lushness, but for all their secret, fervid encounters, Robbie and Elordi hardly set the windy, wet, bleak Wuthering Heights on fire.”

“Wuthering Heights can be a compelling, engaging watch for those who have the appetite for a 'ever-so-slight-amount' of depravity in their romance. Director Emerald Fennell creates a visual scape that creates images of the characters' feelings, evoking specific reactions and setting the mood for exactly what the characters are feeling.”

“This haunting retelling of a love story drenched in darkness is worth a watch.”

“Marketed as a Valentine's Day treat, audiences can expect to be mildly entertained by the surface-level intimate scenes in Wuthering Heights that only leave you thirsty for the real, raw passion. If you grew up reading and dissecting the novel, you may be disappointed to know that Fennel doesn't do justice to the rich layering, ambiguity and interpretation of the character arc in the original.”

“Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights adaptation struggles to capture the novel's emotional depth. The film's central romance fails to ignite, leaving audiences detached and unengaged.”

“The new adaptation, directed by Academy Award-winner Emerald Fennell, demands obedience. In doing so, it commits the error not only of discarding the gigantic obligation of adaptation but also of making an utter mess of it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”