"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" **

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" does not work on its own terms because Emerald Fennell does not pick a lane, because she has no good original ideas, and because she has no cinematic taste. She thinks she’s daring and transgressive but actually she’s just crass and juvenile and undercuts any attempts her actors are making to inject credibility or elicit sympathy from the audience. Hong Chau is good as Nelly and Jacob Elordi tries hard as Heathcliff in a straight drama. Isabella is played - problematically - for broad knowing laughs in a second separate film. Martin Clunes is playing a Dickensian villain in a third. Margot Robbie is just too old and haggard to play Cathy at any age. Ultimately though this is Fennell’s failure. I laughed at the screen when Clunes died amidst two piles of empty gin bottles. I laughed harder when Atlanta was burning. We get it Emerald: you watched GONE WITH THE WIND and REBECCA. Now please do fuck off and direct music videos. 

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" REALLY does not work as an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s actually transgressive novel. The juvenile absurd emotions turned up to eleven revenge psychodrama that Cathy and Heathcliff put each other through only makes sense when you know they are adolescents - when Cathy dies at 20. The idea that marrying Heathcliff would degrade Cathy only works when money won’t wash over his “otherness” because he is either the son of a black slave or a gypsy or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they ever had sex. It’s not a love story. It’s a story of psychosexual sadism carried over three generations. Eliminating Hindley means we have no Hindley-Heathcliff-Cathy triad to mirror the Edgar-Heathcliff-Cathy triad or the Hareton-Heathcliff-Cathy2 triad. 

Of course Emerald Fennell is narcissistic enough to think we give a shit about how SHE felt reading the novel at 14 and that the book is unfilmable. But Andrea Arnold made a superb film of the first half off this book. And I hate to break it to you Emerald, we watch this because of Bronte not you. 

And don’t even get me going on a deeply privileged white woman blathering on in press tours about how this is a female made movie as if this allows her to erase the fact that the lead actor should be a person of colour and that the entire story is about him being diminished for being brown. And then - just to add insult to injury - Margot Robbie parading jewelry stolen from Mughal India and ascribing its ownership to Liz Taylor - erasing its actual origin. Either they are racist or stupid or both. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It gets a star for Hong Chau and a star for Martin Clunes. 

More thoughts: Heathcliff’s continual demand of consent from Isabella was deeply troubling. A joke, played for recognition. But also part of the overall softening of Heathcliff and Cathy - to make them “likeable” and credible as a love story gone wrong. Young Cathy isn’t pinching and punching staff. Heathcliff doesn’t kill Isabella’s dogs. Eliminating the back half of the book makes Heathcliff a lot less violent and indeed borderline necro. I also feel that making Cathy’s baby die early in the womb so that Cathy then dies of septicaemia is a way for Emerald to keep Cathy/Robbie looking “pretty” and unpregnant to the end. It allows Cathy and Heathcliff to keep pretending that they are starcrossed lovers in arrested development.  Emerald can’t handle them being culpable adults as much as they can’t.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Guillermo Del Toro has been waiting all his life to bring FRANKENSTEIN to the screen, and as a result this film almost feels derivative of works that he made in preparation for this, such as CRIMSON PEAK.  The resulting film is wonderful to look at - a true spectacle - and worth seeing on the big screen rather than Netflix.  But other than a handful of moments, it isn’t a film that ripped my heart out, as this story should.

Oscar Isaac (STAR WARS’ Poe Dameron) stars as Victor Frankenstein, the spoiled rich aristocrat who studies medicine precisely to succeed where his hated father failed, in restoring the dead to life.  He walks around 19th Century Europe like Marc Bolan, all Cuban heels and flared trousers and a coquettishly angled fedora.  He creates a lab with the help of his guileless but practical little brother William (Felix Kammerer - ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT) and the unending funding of Christoph Waltz’ oleaginous and slippery Harlander. Frankenstein’s problem is that he is unimpressed with the mental capacity of his monster and so accords it no humanity. He cannot see that it’s just a child in need of patience and education.  He becomes as brutal and unyielding a parent as his own father was to him.  The monster and castle are torched, but as we know, the monster is unkillable.

In the second half of the film we see the story from the monster’s eyes. Jacob Elordi plays him as a gentle and melancholy giant, with an odd Yorkshire accent that presumably reflects Elordi’s preparation to play Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming WUTHERING HEIGHTS.  The monster is a hurt brooding emo teenager, brought to literacy by a kindly blind man, and lonely in his eternal purgatory.  He seeks out Victor to make him a mate and in doing so rekindles the mutual attraction with Victor’s compassionate sister-in-law to be, Elizabeth (Mia Goth). It’s a mutual attraction that makes Victor jealous.

As the film ends we are back on the Danish polar explorer marooned in ice, and we have a reconciliation of sorts between hard-hearted father and hurt son.  In an adaptation worth its salt this should have moved me to tears. It did not.  Even the scenes with David  Bradley’s old man, while sweet, didn’t truly get to me.  Only the scenes between Goth and Elordi carried any emotional weight. 

And so, while this film looked absolutely stunning, I didn’t capture my heart. I loved watching it and luxuriating in its beautiful sets and costumes but it won’t stay with me. I think the problem may well be that the exaggerated costumes and production design actually got in the way of me connecting with it emotionally. I think the beautiful and brilliant artifice was the problem.

FRANKENSTEIN has a running time of 149 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It will be released on the internet on November 7th.

PRISCILLA** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 7

PRISCILLA is the second film of the day that is well enough directed and acted but where you leave wondering why on earth it was made. The plot can be summarised as "child is groomed by celebrity, coercively controlled, is fine with it until she isn't". Maybe there's a film in that. This film isn't it.  

When we meet Priscilla she a fourteen year old and very visibly a young immature girl.  The way in which Elvis Presley's fellow US soldier picks her up for a party with Elvis feels like he has procured her.  Writer-director Sofia Coppola might have made more of her being underage than she chooses to. Important scenes are eliminated.  We are left wondering exactly what Elvis said to her parents to make them send her to the United States and sign over guardianship. It's all left very vague and thus remains frustrating.  Similarly, we never know if Elvis has a pattern of going for underage girls, or whether Priscilla is "special". It's clear that while their relationship is more or less chaste for a while (at least according to her), he is satisfying his needs elsewhere.

Meanwhile for pretty much the entire running time of the film, Priscilla is a mute doll, whom Elvis dresses up.  She looks like a doll next to him, especially given actor Jacob Elordi's height.  Coppola doesn't give her much of an interior life, and while I felt sorry for her, after two hours I didn't feel as if I knew her.  Maybe that's because until she left Elvis, she hadn't been allowed to get to know herself? Either way, it makes for rather a dull film.

All of which is rather a shame. Caillee Spaeny is visually compelling as Priscilla even when she is given little to do. Jacob Elordi gives an effortless performance as Elvis, impressing with his accent-work.  But I just wanted more.

While my mind was wondering, I was thinking what might have attracted Coppola to this story, and kept seeing parallels to her MARIE ANTOINETTE. Both begin with a barely teenager plucked from her loving but provincial family home and taken to a glamorous estate that will become her prison, complete with courtiers. Both begin and end when she arrives and then leaves. Both see a young girl overwhelmed by rules about what she can do, who she can see, what she can wear.  Both see their hair become taller as the years progress. Both decline to show us life beyond the gates.  Even in shot framing and construction there are similar choices. Compare and contrast the egregious shots of luscious glutinous food in MARIE ANTOINETTE with the scene in which successive plates of junk food are placed outside of Elvis' door. 

The difference is that MARIE ANTOINETTE had stakes. It wasn't just an unhappy marriage. It was a political crisis. PRISCILLA is "just" the story of an unhappy marriage.  If Coppola had successfully mined Priscilla's interior life, in the way that made me cry for Marie-Antoinette, that would've been enough.  But it is not enough here.

PRISCILLA is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Venice and London 2023.  It opens in the US on November 3rd.

SALTBURN** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Opening Night Gala

Emerald Fennell's second directorial feature is a desperately disappointing mash-up of superior works.  We begin with forty minutes of Brideshead, before morphing into The Talented Mr Ripley by way of The Blandings and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Worse still, Fennell uses transgressive sexual acts to paper over the unoriginal and meandering plot. The film is not as darkly funny as she thinks it is. And its only saving graces are Rosamund Pike as the AbFab clueless matriarch, and Carey Mulligan in a touching cameo as the mother's addict friend Pamela. One star for each of them, and half a star for Richard E Grant shouting "Just eat the bloody pie!"

Barry Keoghan stars as the Ripley-esque Oliver Quick, a Fresher at a fantasy Oxford where  you drive up to the Rad Cam, smoke in your room, and students not tourists drink at the KA. Oliver is drawn into the in-crowd when he helps out Felix Catton (Euphoria's Jacob Elordi), and lands an invitation to his Brideshead-style country house, Saltburn. In addition to Felix, Oliver charms the Wodehousian ditsy father, caustically selfish mother and vulnerable sister (newcomer Alison Oliver). The only person who seems on to his manipulations from the start is the family's poor relation Farrell (Archie Madekwe - GRAN TURISMO).  Game senses game. 

The film proceeds at a leisurely pace, with every plot twist telegraphed years in advance. The way the film develops will not surprise anyone with a shred of (cine-) literacy. There are occasional lines or scenes that are mordantly funny and brilliantly constructed, mostly involving Pike and Mulligan.  But between them, ennui and an infantile desire to shock.

Fennell's first feature, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, was just that. SALTBURN is a step back. Will her inevitable third feature show this to be a mis-step? Will her directorial choices add to her narrative or to continue to be puzzling (why the 4:3 aspect ratio?) or showy without effect (look! mirrors!)?

SALTBURN has a running time of 127 minutes. It will open in the USA on November 24th.