Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a film for perverts. This is praise. With its nearly incestuous (and nearly necrophiliac!) doomed romance, the 2011 adaptation is full of quivering eroticism and feral brutality, less interested in maintaining pure authenticity with Emily Brontë’s narrative than in constructing vivid presentations of love as an engine for discomfort, agony, and vengeance. The movie equates the hidden, natural world with our hidden, carnal urges — our desire to taste and bite and suck and lick — and swells the story with tension between repression and possession. Comparatively, the cum-slurping and grave-humping in Saltburn is for beginners.
Brontë’s Gothic classic is a story of forbidden things — forbidden love, forbidden freedom, and forbidden humanity — told through the doomed bond between tortured, yearning orphan Heathcliff (played as a teen by Solomon Glave and as an adult by James Howson) and humane, constrained Catherine Earnshaw (Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario). The original novel uses a frame story and an outsider’s perspective, that of the Earnshaw family’s domestic help Nelly, to recount decades of events. Years ago, the Earnshaw patriarch brought home a young boy he found on the street whom he names Heathcliff; the boy forms a close relationship with Earnshaw’s daughter Cathy, and the two of them spend hours alone roaming the Yorkshire Moors. Their intimacy is endangered when Cathy befriends neighbors the Lintons, who mistreat Heathcliff, and it later becomes severed when Cathy announces she’s marrying Edgar Linton. Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights in response; various forms of tragedy, revenge, and attachment follow that tie the families together through generations, and the novel’s ending suggests that the Earnshaws and the Lintons have finally found some kind of symmetry and peace.
Arnold’s film is primarily shaped by three adaptation choices that make for a film more curious than its source material about Heathcliff’s outsider status and the abuse he receives from Cathy’s older brother Hindley, the family’s servant Joseph, and the posh Lintons. The first change is that Heathcliff’s life is told through his own eyes, eyes that look through windows and cracked doors to see arguments about whether he deserves to live here or be thrown back out onto the street. (Arnold said of that POV shift to Filmmaker magazine in October 2012, “One of the things that I felt so strongly poring over it was that Emily was upset about difference. She was upset about being female. And I think Heathcliff is really a representation of a part of her, a part of her that felt annoyed about being different.â€) The second is that the back half of the book, which focused on Heathcliff’s scheming and villainy, is gone, so the film’s 129-minute run time is focused only on the time Heathcliff and Cathy spend together.
And the third, and most meaningful, is that Arnold takes seriously all the language Brontë uses to describe Heathcliff’s race — terms like “dark-skinned gipsy,†“Lascar†(referring to a sailor of Indian or South Asian descent), “an American or Spanish castaway,†or a child of an “Emperor of China†or an “Indian queen†— and casts two Black actors in the role. Doing so sets Arnold’s version apart from other adaptations, in which white actors like Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, and Ralph Fiennes played Heathcliff, and gives Wuthering Heights another layer of friction and another level at which the events onscreen feel forbidden for their time.
An interracial love story is one thing; an interracial love story in which the two people involved are embedded in a cycle of injury and soothing as a sign of their devotion and passion is another. By modern terms, what Heathcliff and Cathy do to each other in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights — shoving each other around, holding each other down, purposefully making the other jealous — isn’t role-model stuff. Contemporaneous reviews were mixed, with pans complaining about the mood (Eliza C. Thompson called the film “so bleak that it ends up being a little too hard to watch†for Bust) and the wilder erotic swings (“The final scenes are less discomfiting than laughable,†wrote Boston Globe critic Ty Burr).
But our discomfort is key to Arnold’s vision. A foundational aspect of her argument is that Heathcliff and Cathy’s love for each other became so charged because it was so illicit, and found so many animalistic means of expression because proper English society wouldn’t allow it. The script Arnold co-wrote with Olivia Hetreed may not include what is arguably the book’s most recognized line — Cathy’s “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same†— yet the film makes up for that omission by luxuriating in the earthly details that amplify this story’s elemental chill. Wuthering Heights is shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio (which Arnold called “not a popular format,†but one that gives its characters “real respect and importanceâ€), and for every mind-bendingly wide shot of dreary, fog-laden hills and wildflowers and boulders and a Planet Earth–style close-up of flora and fauna, there’s an accompanying moment of startling, almost unnerving intimacy between Heathcliff and Cathy. The film compares the natural world’s rhythms and dramas with Heathcliff and Cathy’s urges for each other; as hardwired as animals and plants are to survive, so too are they compelled to push one another away and then pull them back.
During their first days together, Cathy spits on Heathcliff, then shares with him her collection of bones and feathers, the two of them together caressing the quills and plumes, including her favorite, a half-black, half-white feather from a lapwing bird. Later that night, dressed in an oversize white nightgown in which she pretends to be a ghost, Cathy invites Heathcliff to sleep beside her in bed. When Cathy turns to look at him, Arnold’s camera focuses on the texture of the blanket, then on the tight curls of Heathcliff’s hair. Later on, Heathcliff runs away from the indentured servitude he’s forced into on the estate to wander the moors with Cathy; when they come back home, he unbuttons her dress and cleans her hair. Arnold then shows us a close-up of a bright-yellow moth, its wings and antennae quivering in the air, an image of anticipation and eagerness to echo whatever is building between these two teens.
And the first (of many) sexually charged moments between Heathcliff and Cathy emphasizes Arnold’s terrestrial juxtaposition even more explicitly. Cathy and Heathcliff smear each other with mud and tussle on the ground until he gets the upper hand, straddling her and holding her down; her legs kick out until they don’t, and she fights back until she doesn’t. The two stay there, staring into each other’s eyes in a position of dominance and submission, until Arnold cuts away to a clump of branches dotted with dew, the drops of moisture threatening to drip.
It’s an astonishingly kinky parallel, and it’s only one of various shockingly sensual, deeply uncomfortable interactions to come between Heathcliff and Cathy: her tongue licking the blood from his whipped back. The two embracing and grasping each other tight enough to hurt in the home Cathy shares with her husband, and Arnold conveying their desire through Cathy’s fist clenched in Heathcliff’s hair, his hands moving up and down her torso, and the exhaustion in Scodelario’s voice when she says to Howson, “You killed me.†(The four performances that make up this pair’s dynamic are all raw and impactful, but Scodelario and Howson are particularly magnetic, giving each glancing look and touch — a stolen gaze through a window, a gloved hand lightly grasping an arm — anguished weight.) And in the film’s most radical scene, Heathcliff’s body writhing on top of Cathy’s corpse, the sheets rustling and the candlelight blurring the outlines of their silhouettes, his face kissing her pallid-in-death one, his arm holding her limp hand up to rest against his neck.
Other major moments from the novel follow in the film, like a frenzied Heathcliff digging up Cathy’s grave in the middle of a storm and a tree branch tapping against a window possibly being Cathy’s ghost. But nothing is as effective as that macabre consummation, and what it suggests about how Heathcliff and Cathy’s desire for each other is powerful enough to escape life’s borders and boundaries and endure in death.
In the years since the film’s release, it’s slid into forgotten-adaptation territory. It never got the Tumblr adoration of Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride & Prejudice, and it lost out in widespread acclaim to Cary Fukunaga’s similarly moody 2011 adaptation of Brontë’s sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. But, to quote another tragic romance: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume.†Arnold’s adaptation is a glut of hunger and longing, a cornucopia of stifled delights and keen despair that tests what we’ll tolerate as expressions of love. Wuthering Heights is the Valentine’s Day watch that will turn you on as much as it makes you turn away.