Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in 'Wuthering Heights.' Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment It's possible that your first thought upon encountering Margot Robbie's Cathy draped over a rock pleasuring herself on the wild and windy West Yorkshire moors in Wuthering Heights might be, "Merle Oberon sure never went at it this hard." Which probably is a good indication that Emerald Fennell's unabashedly horny adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic is best approached on its own terms - not in comparison with William Wyler's 1939 film, in which Oberon co-starred with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, and even less so with the brooding gothic source material. This is not your Penguin Classics school curriculum edition. Related Stories Movies U.K. Production Spend Hits $9B in 2025, Film Investment Sets Record Thanks to 'Wuthering Heights,' Beatles Movies and 'Avengers: Doomsday' Movies Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights': First Reactions Brontë's 1847 novel has been translated to the screen upwards of 20 times before, in English and American iterations but also international reinterpretations set in France, Japan, Mexico, India and the Philippines, drawing esteemed directors as varied as Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel and Kijū Yoshida. Wuthering Heights The Bottom Line A ripe and juicy bodice-ripper. Release date: Friday, Feb. 13Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy MorganDirector-screenwriter: Emerald Fennell, based on the novel by Emily Brontë Rated R, 2 hours 16 minutes The most eye-rolling takes ditched the cold, blustery original setting right there in the title in favor of sun-drenched California in teen romances produced by MTV and Lifetime, the latter airdropped into Malibu and rechristened, ahem, Wuthering High. Please, people, not everything in the English-lit canon can withstand Clueless treatment. Fennell's overhaul flirts with insanity, and if you can let go of preconceived notions about how this story should be told, it's arguably the writer-director's most purely entertaining film - pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color and opulent design, laced with anachronistic flourishes, sexy, pervy, irreverent and resonantly tragic. Often teetering on the verge between silly and clever, it's Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation, guaranteed to moisten tear ducts and inflame young hearts. In a collision of ecstasy and despair, Robbie is ideally paired with Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the foundling child picked up off the Liverpool docks and taken in by Cathy's dotty, widowed father Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), to be raised as her stepbrother. That quasi-sibling proximity does nothing to prevent turbulent desire and mutual intoxication from creeping into their late-childhood games, fully flowering as they enter adulthood. While there's a suggestion of racial and class undertones in Cathy's air of teasing superiority over Heathcliff, the film, like many before it, largely whitewashes the underlying toxicity that makes the central relationship - despite its two-way magnetic pull - unsettling. While Brontë fudges Heathcliff's specific ethnicity, she's not exactly being subtle by having characters describe him early on as a "dark-skinned gipsy," "an imp of Satan" and "a little Lascar," a term used for Indian and Southeast Asian sailors trafficked by British traders. The whiff of colonialism and imperialism is all over the novel and its othering of Heathcliff as "a savage." During the period when the book was set, Liverpool was one of the busiest and most brutal slave-trading ports in England, and there are hints that the young Heathcliff might once have had an "owner." Whether Brontë's writing is inherently racist or condemning racism has long been a subject of debate. Those aspects that make Wuthering Heights a somewhat uncomfortable text for contemporary readers are for the most part skirted in Fennell's adaptation, which swaps the emphatic depiction of British classism in Saltburn for more veiled allusions. Literary purists might say the director is making it more commercially palatable, unlike, say Andrea Arnold's raw, naturalistic 2011 version, the first to cast Black actors as Heathcliff. But this is a Valentine's Day weekend release from a major studio and Fennell is unapologetic about any concessions she makes toward popular tastes. Her take on the novel is that of a transcendent love story, which aims to have as dizzying an effect on its audience as it does on Cathy and Heathcliff. In that, it succeeds, before spiraling into a cautionary tale about denial of the heart's true longings. Mr. Earnshaw is capricious - jolly one minute, enraged the next - and Cathy to some degree shares that unpredictable natu