I'm a Classics Nerd and Didn't Hate the New 'Wuthering Heights' Film Nearly as Much as I Anticipated

The first thing I scribbled into my notebook was "wildly unhinged." The opener was chilling; I squirmed in my plush velvet seat, looked away. It was morbid; it was grotesque. This was the foundation on which the rest of the film would be laid. In this respect, let's discuss what Fennell did get right. Because spoiler, it wasn't all bad. The director absolutely nailed the ambiance of the Yorkshire moors. Every scene is dark and grimy, filthy, really. The set is borderline claustrophobic, from Wuthering Heights' low ceilings to the various caged animals and Catherine's physics-defying corsets. As per the region, the film is...damp. Most of the time, it's raining; everyone is soaking wet. If Mr. Darcy (or Benedict Bridgerton, for that matter) emerging from the lake made you swoon, then I hate to say it, but you are in the right place. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff spends an inordinate amount of time in a soaking wet Victorian shirt.

Everything else is a mixed bag. I can't definitively say that it was awful, neither can I say it was excellent. My opinions about the film are grounded in Fennell's quote from the BBC interview: "I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it's an emotional response to something. It's, like, primal, sexual." So essentially what we're getting at is that Wuthering Heights is a smutty fan fiction fever dream written by a 14-year-old.

Smutty it was. The opening scene lays the groundwork for what is an incredibly sensual, sexual, sinister undertone. You've seen the trailers: Bread dough, egg yolks, a sweating back looked at in ways you can't unsee. The tension is there, and it's taut. Fennell even goes so far as to imply BDSM in one scene. I'm not sure that any of this was necessary, but it is effective in setting this baseline for brutality that is relentless until the fade-out.

While there was a lot of sexual content (is it an Emerald Fennell movie if there isn't?), I was surprised at how...chaste everything was rendered. There's also the commendable fact that nothing really happens until at least halfway through the film. The characters have to earn it; they're not just thrown together as quickly as possible. I think that in this way, Wuthering Heights did accomplish something that people love about period dramas. The yearning is intense, as it should be. In the book, Heathcliff says of Catherine after losing her to Edgar: "If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in 80 years, as I could in a day."

In this vein, there's also the topic of Heathcliff and Isabella's relationship, which some are saying is inappropriate, goes too far. Yes, it is completely dehumanizing, disturbing, unsettling. People are right to condemn it. Close reading of the source material, though, leads me to believe that, if not the best interpretation, Fennell's vision is a possible interpretation, when Heathcliff says:

"The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog, and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly, she took that exception for herself—But no brutality disgusted her—I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now was it not the depth of absurdity of genuine idiocy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her?" (Wuthering Heights, page 150)

It is fundamentally imperative to understand that Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel—expecting a sanitized love story à la Jane Austen would be to completely miss the point. Emily Brontë ultimately wrote an intergenerational revenge plot that was deemed "morally transgressive" in its time. It makes me wonder how she would have written the book if she were living today.

Then there is the casting and performances. Totally, completely miscast, but for what it was, I thought the actors executed their roles well, working with what they had. Was it weird to see 35-year-old Margot Robbie act like an impetuous teenager? Yes. Is the actual Catherine an impetuous teenager? Yes. To not play her as such would be to deny the very essence of Brontë's protagonist. And Elordi, though he does not resemble Heathcliff at all (a problem that warrants its own discussion), captured his character's raw brutality in ways that had my heart racing, and not in a swoon-worthy way.

We could decry the litany of ills: The abused Yorkshire accents (this honestly did not bother me), inaccurate (though sumptuous) costumes, contemporary soundtrack, on and on. But to do so would be to hold the film to something it was never going to be. Yes, Fennell's Wuthering Heights is wildly inaccurate. It erases and decentralizes a complex story about a man who is racially ambiguous and of low social standing, putting the focus on a torrid love story that cuts out the second half of the novel. I could almost visualize a 14-year-old Emerald Fennell in her bedroom, furiously typing away on a Compaq computer while a '90s punk girl band played on the boom box—she would have been 13 in 1998, the year that FanFiction.net hit the world wide web.

Truthfully, only a TV series could do Wuthering Heights justice. Fennell's rendition cuts at the halfway point, though in her defense, she wasn't the first to do it. The film, from its references to the Golden Age of Hollywood to its plotting and pacing, was eerily similar to the 1939 adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, which has the highest rating of all adaptations at 96 percent. Fennell even mentions this adaptation in interviews. But a two-part series for each half of the novel would allow us to appreciate it for what it actually is: A revenge saga.

I'm not saying that Wuthering Heights should win any major awards, but I am saying that for what it set out to be (reminder: 14-year-old smutty fan fiction fever dream), it hit the mark. Evaluating it for what it's never going to be is a moot point. More importantly, if watching the film or simply following the drama surrounding it piques people's interest in the source material, I'll take that as a win, considering that over 50 percent of Americans didn't open a single book last year. Don't agree? Haunt me, then.

Wuthering Heights is in theaters February 13.