Review: ‘Wuthering Heights’

I loved Andrea Arnold’s two previous films, Fishtank and Red Road, so I was looking forward to seeing her take on this classic tale.

The film started promisingly with the revelation that in this version, Heathcliff is black. This adds a whole level of social complexity that I thought might be interesting. I was wrong. Nothing about this film is interesting. It’s beautifully shot, but that’s not enough to make up for the utterly soulless storytelling and lack of any passion, romance or chemistry between the leads.

It is impossible to care about the characters here, least of all Heathcliff whose brutal cruelty to animals and others around him verges on the sadistic. Perhaps this is supposed to represent revenge against those who have oppressed him, but in fact all it does is make him appear as bad as those around him.

There is little music in the film. The soundtrack is instead made up of the sounds of nature from the wild, windswept moors – a lot of heavy rain, wind and birdsong. Long shots of insects intersperse the action for no real purpose.

With barely passable acting, too much of the film’s focus is on violence, misery and suffering.

Overlong, ponderous and unengaging, this Wuthering Heights does something I thought impossible: it turns one of the world’s classic love stories into turgid melodrama. I left the theatre furious that my Sunday night had been wasted on something so dull.

2/10