"Wuthering Heights": A Darling Pain

Okay. Let's start with the confession: I almost didn't go. A 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, critics calling it emotionally hollow, people on Letterboxd absolutely scathing.

But something pulled me in. Call it morbid curiosity. Call it the fact that Emerald Fennell directing Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in a gothic romance on the Yorkshire moors is a sentence that simply demands to be witnessed in person. So I went. And I am now ready to stand on whatever remains of my credibility and say, loudly and without apology: I loved it. LOVED it. Capitals, bold, the whole thing. Completely, embarrassingly, joyfully wrong about this one.

Let's talk about what this film does to you visually, because it is relentless. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren shoots the Yorkshire moors like a living, breathing entity: grey and enormous and hungry. The landscapes aren't backdrop here, they're character. Every sodden hillside, every bruised sky, every field of heather bending sideways in the wind feels deliberately overwhelming.

And the costumes... oh, the costumes. Jacqueline Durran, the woman behind the wardrobes of Anna Karenina and Little Women, goes completely anachronistic and I am obsessed with every single choice. The internet was furious about the historical inaccuracy and I genuinely could not care less. These aren't costumes trying to take you back to a real period, they're trying to make you feel something. They succeed.

Obviously, as is legally required whenever Wuthering Heights is involved in any capacity, I came home and immediately put Kate Bush on.That song still sounds like it was recorded live on an actual moor during an actual storm, and listening to it after the film felt like the only natural conclusion to the evening. Put the kettle on. Let her wail. Stare out the window dramatically. You deserve it.

Now my problem is that this film has given me a deep, Yorkshire-shaped itch I cannot scratch from my sofa. I want to go back to the moors, and more than that, I want to finally sit down with the actual Brontë novel and read it properly, slowly, giving it everything it deserves. Summer reading goal: decided, written here, I am now accountable.

Which means, babe, I'm so sorry, but we are going to have to spend a few days outside of Manchester. The moors are calling. Although, and I've been genuinely debating this, is summer even the right atmosphere for Wuthering Heights? There's a very compelling argument for saving it until December. Specifically, a December read in Bakewell, somewhere with a fireplace, the light going at four o'clock, and a truly excellent chai. Heathcliff demands that kind of cold.

I haven't decided yet. Knowing me, I'll end up doing both.

The point is: go see it. Don't let the bad reviews put you off the way they almost put me off. Some films are not for critics in that moment: they're for people willing to sit inside them and let them do their thing.

Now if you'll excuse me, Kate Bush is still playin…