The New Yorker:

By Hannah Jocelyn

After many months of the public yearning for it, the new “Wuthering Heights” adaptation has finally arrived. But whether our collective desire has been sated is up for (a lot of) debate. I chatted with the film critic Justin Chang—who reviewed the movie, and found it lush but lacking—about whether the director Emerald Fennell succeeded in giving the people what they want.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

The discourse is intense with this one. Do you think that was inevitable, considering the hype that surrounded its release?

I’d say the hype and the discourse began in July, 2024, when the movie was first announced. Fennell is a polarizing filmmaker, with a self-consciously provocative streak. So her decision to tackle a beloved, much-adapted classic generated predictable outrage from the start—and not just any classic but “Wuthering Heights,” which is its own dark, contentious beast of a novel.

“Underneath Fennell’s brazen streak,” you write, “is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve.” Tell me more about that?

I think it’s the flip side of her audacity. She throws a lot at the screen here—a lot of skin, a lot of décor, a lot of boldly anachronistic touches. For all that, it’s a thuddingly one-note movie, and one note is hard to sustain for two-plus hours. She’s trying to hit at least two notes—on some level, I think she wants us to laugh at the torrid nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance and feel deeply moved by it—but she just doesn’t get there.

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