I loved Wuthering Heights. The book, and Fennell & Robbie’s film. I don’t write film reviews, in fact, never, but after observing some of the negativity slamming this contemporary reimagining of the Emily Bronte classic, I wanted to share my view, as someone who watched it with the fresh eyes of my 16-year-old daughter.
It’s awkward watching a graphically sexual film with your teenage daughter – more for her than for me. I could feel her squirming next to me. The finger in the fish mouth. The woman in the horse bridle. The sex against the wall. But that was only in fragments. This dark and torturous tale moved quickly.
It was one of those films that left me feeling shattered and desolate. A sense of deep sadness and horror. It’s exactly what gothic novels intend to deliver. There are no happy endings here. In fact ‘happy’ destroys these stories.
I was expecting Ivy to tell me she hated it. But instead she said, ‘that’s the best film I have seen in a long time.’ I said, ‘I agree.’ And then started a long conversation about what it was to be a woman in the late 1700s. We talked about class, and agency. About what it has cost women to live to societal convention. We talked about the brutality of that era – the normalcy of hanging, and cruelty. Of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Of abusive parents. Of suppressing your own wildness. Of having no choice that was ever your own. None of the women had choice. It was a currency of compromise to survive.
This is not a conversation Ivy and I have ever had after a film. Talking consent and coercion. About desire and destruction. That is a triumph for any filmmaker – to create something that just makes people combust – either loving or hating your content, but having the conversation. It’s a powerful ignition. And I appreciated that we’d been made to feel uncomfortable and exposed. There was definitely something disruptive. The classic was torn asunder.
I love that this was a story by the most complex Bronte sister, the more poetic, harder-to-understand one. That the film was written, produced, and directed by women. That the score was by Charlie XCX, a wild child herself, traversing the moors of her own dark yearnings.
This was never meant to be an accurate retelling of the book. Why would you make that again? This was an emotive reimagining of the deeper themes, the gothic stories that we as women still face. Men are still murdering us, we still live in a patriarchy, and there is so little space to hold our shadows.
This film gave me an insight that has lingered. Something that never occurred to me. What if Heathcliff wasn’t real? What if he was part of Cathy’s imaginings – her ‘pet’ that she kept under the bed? Her filthy illiterate but fiercely protective masculine? What if he was her? Named after her dead brother, rescued from the street by her unredeemable alcoholic father, her twin spirit, the other half of her ‘soul’. Not romantic unrequited love, but a split self? An unrequited self love?
Its was the wildness and agency that had to be surrendered to live a curated life of wealth and privilege. He was her heart. He was her. She had to kill her shadow to live. But he came back. And made living a perfect lie unbearable. The violence is this separation from self. Isn’t the true coercion here authored by the patriarchy? By class?
I loved that I thought back to the work of the poetic Emily with a new interpretation. And that my daughter could approach an old story with a contemporary lens. And I love that women made this. And they knew they would be criticised and hung high in the town square. They’re too old. Too blonde. Too much like Barbie. Too different from the book…but they did it anyway. Unapologetic.
It made me realise why I have always found that bloody story so unsettling. Because I know what it is to be Cathy. That the darkness and shadow is not separate to me. It is me. I’m Cathy. I’ve come home.
(Only thing I would have added at the end was Kate Bush.)
Mandy Nolan’s column has appeared in The Echo for almost 25 years. She is a writer, comedian and artist, and was the Greens candidate at the past two elections.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
