BRIAN VINER: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have lashings of kinky sex but it’s less Wuthering Heights more Fifty Shades of Grimm

Wuthering Heights (15, 136 minutes)

Verdict: Style trumps substance

Evaluation:

The people at Visit Yorkshire are sure to call a crisis meeting when they see how much rain is falling at Wuthering Heights.

The premiere of Emerald Fennell’s highly anticipated film in London last Thursday couldn’t have been this rainy, and the deluge wasn’t just on the big screen.

Leicester Square outside the Odeon was also buzzing, as if in solidarity with those wild and windy northern moors that Kate Bush had so memorably howled about so many years ago.

Bush’s song, which later admitted that she had not even read Emily Bronte’s novel while writing the lyrics, spoiled the plot considerably.

I’m sure Fennell knows the book upside down, but she’s not doing Brontë any favors either; re-imagines the story as a dark fairy tale with subtle nods to Snow White, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood, then adds lashings of salacious sex. Less Wuthering Heights, more Fifty Shades of Grimm.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, the moody duo who give literature’s most star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, a run for their money. Their love is never consummated off the page.

This is a great chance on the screen; They are in this business everywhere, at every opportunity.

As children (played by Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame), the class bond between the pair is disrupted after Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes) brings a dirty chestnut back to the family’s remote Yorkshire farm, Wuthering Heights.

In adulthood, when Heathcliff returns after many years and his social status has strengthened, the stormy mutual passion between them intensifies. But by then she has married her rich, cultured neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).

At 35, Robbie is clearly too mature to play Brontë’s complex young heroine. At the time, it might have been reasonable for a woman her age to expect to become a grandmother.

But that aside, both he and Elordi are extremely pleasing to the eye and there’s no reason why a few Australians couldn’t play two giants of British fiction. After all, Tom Hardy played Mad Max.

Unfortunately, Cathy and her Heathcliffs are so irredeemably superficial and selfish that I couldn’t feel less invested in their emotional turmoil – which is wildly overrated as ‘romance’ as Valentine’s Day approaches.

Neither duo is what you would call cute in the book. But readers believe their toxic obsession with each other has been around since 1847.

Here, Fennell shortened the story by either tinkering with characters and subplots or removing them entirely. The middle Brontë sister (of three writers) will not be turning in her grave, but will emerge from it in a state of what the early Victorians called uneasiness.

At 35, Robbie is clearly too mature to play Brontë’s complex young heroine. At the time, it might have been reasonable for a woman her age to expect to become a grandmother.

Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame plays Heathcliff as a child

Of course, Fennell isn’t the only one who decided to adapt a famous novel for the big screen and then messed with the story as if the original wasn’t quite up to snuff. Producer Sam Goldwyn had insisted that the 1939 version, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, have a happy ending.

But it’s a far more satisfying film than this beautiful but ultimately empty exercise, empty in style than substance, cinematography empty in spirit.

Some flounder on pastiche. Clunes portrays Mr. Earnshaw as a cruel, gin-soaked monster, a one-dimensional cardboard cutout and frankly not the kind of man who would take pity on an urban ragtag.

Edgar’s sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) is used purely as comic relief, at least until the vengeful Heathcliff marries her and subjects her to a humiliation worthy of a porn movie.

We saw in the bad-ass comedy-thriller Saltburn (2023) that Fennell liked to load her characters with alarming sexual antics, so there was never any chance of them tackling Wuthering Heights without hitting the sado-masochism manual. But honestly.

In the book, Joseph, the Earnshaws’ servant, is a God-fearing old man. Here, as played by Ewan Mitchell, his lustful thrusts would make your average nymphomaniac blush.

This adaptation is fine, but ultimately an empty exercise in style over substance, cinematography over spirit.

There are costume and design flourishes that seem inspired, if not directly borrowed, from Yorgos Lanthimos’ delightfully campy period drama The Favourite.

Fennell sexualizes her film in other ways, too, with a deliberately anachronistic score by popular singer-songwriter Charli

That’s all well and good, but this is serving up a love story between two people I don’t care about, and I doubt I’ll be alone.

‘I guess you like to see me cry,’ Cathy accuses her lifelong friend Nelly Dean (Hong Chau). “Not half as much as you like to cry,” Nelly replies, and she’s right. When Cathy’s uncontrollable sobs are added to the relentless rain, this movie becomes a very wet movie indeed. Except where it really matters, which is in the audience.

As the final credits rolled, there wasn’t a single wet eye in the house as far as I could see.

Wuthering Heights opens in theaters Friday