Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is not an action-packed novel, so don’t expect this film to be either. Andrea Arnold’s interpretation, the latest contribution to a lengthy tradition of adaptations starring actors such as Sir Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is long, and at times painfully slow.

Arnold’s film succeeds in conveying the darkness of the book. The English moors have never looked more beautiful and isolated; battered by ceaseless wind and torrents of rain.

The characters seem as eroded by the harshness of the weather as the land they inhabit. The majority of the actors involved do a great job of playing Brontë’s characters, but if James Howson is a frightening, grief-stricken, devilish Heathcliff, Kaya Scodelario’s Catherine is a flatter character; more whimsical woman than Brontë’s tortured protagonist.

Nonetheless, this is a remarkable film, driven by some bold directorial choices which have made what could have been just another cinematographic version of a well-known story into a visual feast. The attention to detail through close ups, the slow pulling of the focus in several blurred shoots, an extreme use of light, and the total lack of a soundtrack, land the film an eerie vibe.

This is a bewildering piece of cinema: shocking and unflinching but subtle. It is a film that hints but does not show, and leaves the audience puzzled on more than one occasion. The viewer is simultaneously enraptured by its raw style but induced to reflect on the conspicuous use of music and fancy visual effects in mainstream cinema. By contrast, Wuthering Heights, mostly filmed with a hand-held camera, is as bare and haunting as the landscape in which it is set, and all the more memorable for it.

REVIEWED AT CAMEO