Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s Kinky Romance Unveiled

Wuthering Heights (15, 136mins)

Verdict: Style over substance 

Rating:

When the people at Visit Yorkshire see just how much rain buckets down in Wuthering Heights, they will surely call a crisis meeting.

Last Thursday's London premiere of Emerald Fennell's eagerly-anticipated film could hardly have been wetter - and the deluge wasn't just on screen. 

Outside the Odeon, Leicester Square too was awash, as if in solidarity with those wild and windy northern moors about which ululated so memorably, all those years ago.

Later admitting that she hadn't even read Emily Bronte's novel when she wrote the lyrics, Bush's song rather mangled the plot. 

I'm sure Fennell knows the book backwards but she does Bronte no favours either, re-imagining the story as a dark fairy-tale with unsubtle nods to Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, then adding lashings of kinky sex. It's less Wuthering Heights, more Fifty Shades of Grimm.

and play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, the moody pair who give Romeo and Juliet a run for their money as literature's most star-crossed lovers. Except on the page their love is never consummated. 

Fat chance of that on screen; they're at it everywhere, every chance they get.

As children (played by Charlotte Mellington, and Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame), the two bond across the class divide after Cathy's father (Martin Clunes) brings a grubby urchin home to Wuthering Heights, the family's remote Yorkshire farm. 

In adulthood, their tempestuous mutual passion intensifies when Heathcliff returns, his social status enhanced, after years away. But by then she has married her wealthy, cultured neighbour Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).

At 35, Robbie is clearly way too mature to play Bronte's complex teenage heroine. Back then, a woman of her age might have reasonably expected to be a grandmother.

But if we overlook that, she and Elordi are both extremely pleasing on the eye, and there's no reason why a couple of Australians shouldn't play two giants of English fiction. Tom Hardy played Mad Max, after all.

Unfortunately, their Cathy and Heathcliff are so irredeemably shallow and selfish that I could not have felt less invested in their emotional tumult – which in the run-up to Valentine's Day is being wildly hyped as 'romance'.

The pair are not what you'd call likeable in the book, either. But readers have been buying into their toxic obsession with one another since 1847. 

Here, Fennell has pared back the story, either tinkering with characters and sub-plots or removing them altogether. The middle Bronte sister (of the three who became writers) won't be turning in her grave so much as rising from it, in a state of what the early Victorians would have called perturbation.

Of course, Fennell is by no means alone in deciding to adapt a celebrated novel for the screen, then fiddling with the story as if the original wasn't quite up to snuff. Producer Sam Goldwyn famously insisted on a happy ending to the 1939 version starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier.  

But that's a much more satisfying film than this handsome but ultimately empty exercise in style over substance, cinematography over soul.

This adaptation is a handsome but ultimately empty exercise in style over substance, cinematography over soul