The huge and misplaced cinematic orgasm of "Wuthering Heights" is at least underwritten by Director Emerald Fennell’s decision to insert her film’s title in inverted commas, lest there be a question mark suspended over the severity of its departure from Emily Brontë’s fiction. Adducing intensity of realisation as the novel’s driving force, Fennell re-imagines the tableau as a discordant psychodrama, pitching a brutal and monochrome moorland against the preposterously saccharine Thrushcross Grange, in extreme counterpoint. Driving at the potential of landscape to shape mood and aggravate tension, Fennell’s representation is thunderously overworked: the Heights, here, is cast in darkness, athwart black monoliths of CGI-engineered stone that brood mercilessly over the Earnshaws’ threadbare habitation like a premonition.

Starkly conceived until Catherine (in an overdone performance by Margot Robbie that somehow misses several marks) is tempted by the astonishing confection of Thrushcross, we are as overwhelmed by the contrast as Dorothy Gale must have been when leaving Kansas for Oz: a place of overripe opulence, Edgar Linton’s mansion is blandishment in manicured architectural form, refulgent with exotic foodstuffs, beflowered arbors and decorative gewgaws. And if Linus Sandgren’s richly stylized cinematography is intended to illuminate a yawning class division, then the received effect is closer to satire, a fantasia of psychopathy and schadenfreude finding physical outlet in a violently bloody tableau that unfolds in artful polychromatic overload. Not least in decoration, as the Grange, and some of its denizens, are apparelled in glimmering red and preponderances of pre-synthetic synthetics.

Fennell’s reading, perhaps unsurprisingly in a panorama that seeks to shock by sensual assault, seems obliged to nail Freud to its mast: the opening sequence of a hanging man, priapic in a pastiche of auto-erotic strangulation, clunkily foregrounds the presence of Erotic-Thanatic impulses in a grey Yorkshire village baying for blood and titillation, whilst Catherine’s later masturbatory sequence, played out on the moors, nods to the nihilistic darkness at the heart of the narrative. Heavy symbolisms hang over the drama in unsubtle brushstrokes, harrying the characters towards the cliff of denouement in spite of the best efforts of some of the actors to maintain a semblance of individual agency.

And it is an irony that the cast should elicit the least sympathy. Notwithstanding a persuasive rendering of mercurial aloofness, Margot Robbie is miscast as Catherine in age and appearance. The presence of Jacob Elordi, as Heathcliff, fits the saturnine bill, though without the brood, or seemingly, the ability to level a sense of vengefulness with any degree of menace. And if the couple finally sizzle before the axe falls, it is little comfort to an audience now blinded by the violent shock of the camerawork. Fennell’s nod to Freud is reprised late in the film when Isabella Linton (performed with commendable vapidity by Alison Oliver) becomes complicit in Heathcliff’s sado-masochistic wielding of power and control.

Martin Clunes appeals and appals in a complex turn as Mr Earnshaw, abandoning himself to the subtle counterpose of knee-jerk brutality, guilt and self-pity whilst clinging to the wreckage of existence in drink, and sparking off Nelly Dean, played with an odd mismatch of homespun wisdom and manipulation by Hong Chau.

Charli XCX's swathing, electronically-driven soundtrack, foregrounded by her immense echoing voice, is a complement that cannot rescue "Wuthering Heights", but it is astonishingly fitting, and lends the surreal reading a sense of cohesion and direction. Potential viewers should not be alarmed - this is Brontë, but not as we know it!



"Wuthering Heights"

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Martin Clunes, Shazad Latif, Hong Chau, Alison Oliver.

Soundtrack: Charli xcx

The film is on general release.