Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights—Emily Brontë’s dense Gothic novel about property, retribution, and longing—is perhaps best summed up by a single shot. Somewhere in the film’s murky middle, Margot Robbie’s hurt, horny, haughty Cathy Earnshaw sits at her enormous dining table and idly sticks her fingers into some sort of aspic that contains within it a whole dead fish. Here Fennell intends to offset the swelling lust of her heroine with the icky squalor of her time and place. We are meant to be turned on and repulsed at once, to feel the peculiar electric frizz of that dichotomous clash. The film is a big, heavy attempt at serving us visceral eroticism to complement, or complicate, its characters’ bone-deep pain. But I dunno. I mostly found it gross and dumb. 

The rap on Fennell, or at least my rap on her, is that in her previous two films she shows a knack for casting and aesthetics but is far less sure-footed as a storyteller. Promising Young Woman, which won Fennell a screenwriting Oscar, is a fun premise mostly put to waste by baffling narrative choices. But it looks pretty good! Her next feature, the buzzy Brideshead Revisited riff Saltburn, mutes the color palette but otherwise amps up the visual ornateness, to pleasing effect. Like Promising Young Woman, Saltburn features some fine performances and is plenty entertaining, but eventually shoots itself in the foot by trying to get too clever with twists and reveals and striking a strained pose of devilish amorality. 

Watching Saltburn, I yearned for Fennell to honestly assess her talents and decide that maybe next time, someone else should write the screenplay while she focuses on making everything look great and doing a good job steering her actors. But, alas, that was not meant to be (that writing Oscar really lodged itself in her brain I guess) and thus here is maybe her most ambitious writing project to date, an adaptation of a revered but complex novel, one that does not easily fit the film narrative conventions of today.