Wuthering Heights (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Sometimes even the best filmmakers stumble. 

There's no denying Emerald Fennell's craft, here or elsewhere, but I simply can't understand what she was thinking about while attempting to adapt this material. Wuthering Heights is one of those mythic "unfilmable" titles that never fails to disappoint when removed from Emily Brontë's glorious prose. And yes, despite my personal affection for Peter Kominsky's 1992 adaptation for its Gothic intensity and steamy young stars Juliette Binoche, Janet McTeer, Jeremy Northam, and Ralph Fiennes in his feature film debut, it too struggles to bear up under the sheer weight of its ambitious task of adapting the entire plot. 

A quick note: for whatever reasons, this film has generated more online hubbub than most in recent memory, often accompanied by lengthy claims to knowing what the novel is "about." It's about classism. It's about trauma. It's about star-crossed lovers. It's about necrophilia. And, usually, these claims of enlightenment also claim to be the only one with that special insight. My pro tip for you is to ignore such claims. Anyone who wants to boil down a work as complex and vast in scope as Wuthering Heights to being "about" one thing is a fool who ignores much to aggrandize a limited perspective.

Surely, said I, surely Fennell will be up to her usual subversive tricks. When handling what I consider to be a story in the form of a highly organized nightmare -- a labyrinth of internecine cruelties enacted by stupid rich sociopaths on the only people they could enjoy life with -- Fennell will surely approach from a unique angle. Perhaps the resident servant of the Heights, Nelly Dean (played here by always thrilling Hong Chau), could be our protagonist: after all, she maneuvers her way into positions of influence and thus power in the mad power-plays happening around her. As a more antiheroic lens through which we could view the story in a new light, Nelly Dean could have been Fennell's inlet into an inspiring take on the endlessly reproduced tale. That's what Fennell did in Promising Young Woman and Saltburn alike, the latter even including more than a hint of Gothic aesthetic, which would have been all the more appropriate in this actual Gothic material.

Yet here we are, presented with this mess of anachronistic pop culture narcissism, glorying in its own trashy cheapening of the material while failing to provide us with anything it promised. Like a fever dream of horny high school fantasy, we're told a mere fraction of the story of Heathcliff and Cathy as if by AI-filtered summary of the novel. Narratively taking its structure from the famed 1939 film (with Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and David Niven), which only told the first half of the story and set a dangerous precedent for most adaptations that have followed, the internal logic of the story collapses along with any pretense it has for thematic completion. At our screening, my friend frustratedly said something to the effect of "that was it?", to which I could only nod in annoyed sympathy. If you're going to retell such a classic, at least do it in an interesting way.

Which is the other problem I had with this film: the film itself. We could talk for pages about casting, but not about the tired online hullabaloo that needs to collectively do its historical homework on race and racial identifiers. We could talk for pages about acting: Chau is worth watching here, but Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are deeply uncomfortable to watch for their flat, breathy performances, which was really disappointing given this operatic opportunity. But the spectacle of rural, Gothic Yorkshire is undone time and again by confounding production design and lackluster cinematography (so. much. fog. And this was actually filmed in Yorkshire!). The Heights appears to be entombed in a protrusion of obsidian rising from a rocky moor, which would be maybe interesting if there were volcanoes nearby. Come to think of it, let's just move the setting to the rim of a volcano -- at least there could be interesting visual parallels to the existential precariousness between barren wilderness and boiling, seething, destructive passion -- but there's nothing so interesting here. Apart from a laughably candy-colored red hue repeated as the single visual motif so often it even appears in the Heights dining room. As the entire waxed floor.

Worse, the film promised us sex. This was meant to be the most erotically explicit, even explicitly kinky version of the story. I was down for that; who needs faithfulness to yet another retread of this story? If we're going to dive into the story's eroticism -- which is completely valid -- let's stop tiptoeing and go for it! There is an argument to be made for no explicit sex in the novel: if you want to believe (frankly unrealistically, but you do you) Cathy and Heathcliff and various other characters around them are chaste and abstinent the whole time, you may do so without dishonoring the original text, perhaps allowing that to inform their desperation, madness, and the ultimate tragedy of the whole saga. But that's been done to death. Fennell, rather than giving us a new hard-R vision of the tragedy, plays things distractingly safely. Other than a little skin in a couple scenes and some partially clothed thrusting -- mostly Elordi's, mind -- the only time we see real sex is as a voyeur from above, as two nameless servants (farm hands?) use a horse's bridle while having otherwise completely normal sex. The whole wretched moment is only barely glimpsed, and heard faintly, and it's so wildly unsatisfying that multiple people literally laughed out loud in our screening.

It's mystifying. Fennell has tackled much more transgressive stuff in her other work, approached familiar stories in unique ways, and subverted genre and form conventions all the while. But in this, her most overtly sexually-charged title so far, she fumbles in the sex of it all? What she's giving us isn't even good sex! It's the same issue I have with so much modern romantic fantasy novels, clearly written for middle class white women with a conservative upbringing, in that while they purport to be dirty and scintillating, what they actually describe in prose isn't even good sex so much as horny foreplay for readers with a fetish for frustration and problematic communication.

I'm probably harping on this breakdown of internal logic because Fennell herself seems to be aware of this problem. The film opens with what sounds like orgasmic breathing and rhythmic creaking before we're visually cued into the fact of the scene: a man being hanged publicly. It reminded me of the opening of Quills, and I just... if you know, you know, but that's my favorite film. Anyway, this moment primed me with optimism from the outset due to its explicit tying of sex with death and the complex ritual of violence as entertainment. Those are exactly the themes I'd like to see in a new version of Wuthering Heights, and it was clearly an option in Fennell's mind. She just chose to do the safest and silliest option instead.

Which is saying a lot when even that is at best a middling product on screen. The dialogue is as anachronistic as the costumes, the former being grating and the latter being at least interesting, which could have worked well. Given the modern pop music by Charli XCX, I wondered at times if we were about to lurch into a full Baz Luhrmann and have a ravey postmodern ball (a la The Great Gatsby). That would have been awesome. Alas, the whole thing gave me the strange sensation of being slowly submerged in water. The thing felt shadowy and bleak, strangely artless despite its artificially garish presentation, and even synth droning started to sound unfocused and hazy after a while. As if she knows she's lulling us into a stupor, Fennell takes pains to hammer us over the head with sensory information, less to keep us awake than to force us to Feel Things. What Things? Who knows? We're left adrift as waves of Intended Feelings crash into our eyes and ears, sent by a filmmaker whose boldness and ingenuity simply didn't synthesize with the material.

Profile (2021)

 Score: 2 / 5

Computer thrillers aren't for everyone, and yet the sub-sub-genre category keeps getting new entries. It makes sense that, in the age of digital connection, these movies would naturally grow out of the found footage tradition. And while we might have expected more of these during the recent pandemic (will we get more in the next half-year?), we were thankfully saved from the exacerbated horror of staring at Skype windows projected on large screens. And now we get Timur Bekmambetov's latest, a movie several years too late to be either timely or consequential, feeling like a half-baked idea turned into a half-baked movie. Its doughy makeup and comparative lack of thrills belie some really interesting and insightful ideas, and the final product left me feeling both unsatisfied and bloated.

An investigative journalist in London named Amy (Valerie Kane) creates a fake profile to attract ISIS recruiters. Her job is on the line -- one wonders exactly how she is supporting herself in her flat, with a dog, as her boss facetimes her at all hours -- and her relationship with Matt is equally rocky. Her boss and boyfriend seem to make demands on her she's not ready to fulfill, and for most of the movie the virtual temptations offered by her extremist liaison make sense to the viewer. He offers her money and stability, the promise of hot sex and a life of both passion and leisure, and of course the kind of fulfillment an awkward outsider like her craves. Well, at least, the version of her she's projecting through her profile. (Get it? Because that's the title of the movie!)

But her recruiter, Bilel (a seductive Shazad Latif), makes his own demands. In their earliest chats, he ensures she always wears a head scarf. He uses cats and kittens to lure Amy in, while decrying dogs as dirty and morally corrupt animals. He pressures her constantly to come to Syria with him and marry him, even to the extent of performing a marriage ceremony via Skype. His charm leaves little to the imagination, and over the course of their roughly month-long Skyping romance, we see Amy fall a little too quickly in love with him. She's not the hard-boiled, world-weary investigator we're used to seeing, which might be why she hasn't yet been hired as a full-time writer. Granted, he's also groomed and styled to be more alluring to Western eyes; perhaps the terrorist recruiters are in real life, but it's hard not to suspect the film of propagating stereotypes of brown people in the exotic Middle East.

She's uncannily incompetent, slipping up in just about every way we can see. It's a dangerous gambit for the filmmakers, placing the weight of the film on an unlikable and often stupid protagonist. She happily shares her screen with the invasive recruiter-slash-paramour. She repeats the truth about her actual real-life location. She shares names of people in her circle. When she gets flustered or shocked and doesn't know what to say, she simply ends the Skype call. "We got disconnected," she says, as if the past year hasn't taught us all not to believe that vague excuse. And yet, that Bilel still manages to hook her (and yes, she is emotionally insane enough to actually fall in love with a violent stranger online) says a lot about, well, everyone in this movie.

Despite the horrific representations of humans in the film, Bekmambetov's direction manages to do some interesting things, much as he has done in other films like Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. His ability to evoke panic and dread is on full display here; we can sense Amy's hesitation and even incompetence in her absence, when we're stuck on a screen with Bilel calling or in a video chat with him as her boss and/or boyfriend blow up her chat box. That said, I should also note something that may or may not have been intentional: while this is no horror film, anyone with anxiety or OCD should approach with caution. Amy has so many bloody windows up on her desktop at any given time that I constantly felt sick. Texts, Skype messages and calls, facetime windows, web browsers (with multiple tabs), and her own file explorer (with a ridiculous amount of downloads) all cover a desktop with absolutely no organization at all. It's an exercise in exactly how not to manage your own computer, especially for someone whose job is to investigate, report, and even go undercover. How she manages to pay her own rent is a feat worthy of accolades.

Moreover, there is little to no actual thrill element to the film, and it is here that it irredeemably falters. By the end, when (spoiler alert, in case you're incapable of seeing where this might be going) Amy backs out of flying to Bilel, she begins to rightfully fear for her life. But, as the plot finally gets to its most thrilling and potentially terrifying climax, it ends. There is no clear understanding that Amy's story was successful. There is no payoff with Amy and her boyfriend or boss. There isn't even a clear way to determine whether she survives.

Perhaps that's the point, and perhaps that's even the way the supposedly true-to-life story panned out, but it makes all the preceding action and ideas thematically irrelevant and all the plot inconsequential. This movie would have been terrifying if it had a better ending...and if it had been released three or more years ago.