On Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights'

Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de pasión (1954) opens with a declaration of fidelity: ‘Above all, this picture tries to remain true to the spirit of Emily Brontë’s novel.’ By contrast,“Wuthering Heights”, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, refuses such constraints. Referring to those quotation marks in the title, and the detachment and looseness they imply, Fennell has said in an interview that ‘you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this’. Considering the issue further, she doubles down: ‘Really, I’d say that any adaptation of a novel… should have quotation marks around it.’ This defensiveness is in service of a radical rewrite, which reconfigures Brontë’s 1847 tale of passionate love, class struggle, and revenge as a hyper-sexual (but not particularly sexy) romance between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie).