'Wuthering Heights' Is Like A Horny Teenage Fever Dream — And Yes, That's A Good Thing

The film adaptation of Emily Bronté's novel starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is nothing like the book you read in English class — and for good reason.

In “Dying for You,” Charli XCX sings, “cause you’re the poison I drink, I drink you twice to be sure.” The song is on her new album, “Wuthering Heights,” and was written for Emerald Fennell’s screen adaptation of Emily Bronté’s 1847 novel about the toxic love that binds Catherine (Margot Robbie) to her father’s ward, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi).

Fennell’s adaptation — styled “Wuthering Heights” in quotation marks to connote that it is not a strict interpretation of the gothic text — was inspired by the “profound connection” the director felt to the book as a teenager. With the film, she “wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.”

Mission accomplished.

Fennell’s version of the classic story feels exactly like the kind of ruinous love someone would ruminate in their childhood bedroom while listening to angsty music and imagining that romantic love is supposed to hurt to be real. Put another way, Fennell purposefully sets aside some of the story’s larger themes of gender, class and race to distill it into one of childhood infatuation that evolves into adult devastation.

The result is that viewers looking for a straightforward adaptation of the book are sure to be disappointed, especially since it ignores over half of the source material. However, if you’re like me and open to a cinematic experience that feels like an amorous 14-year-old’s fever dream about a disastrous love story full of irreverent longing that is symbolized through viscous objects like egg yolks and gelatinous fish mouths, then this is the movie for you. Because, like such a dream, it’s visceral and hard to look away and makes you feel everything.