I wish I could say I was being hyperbolic in declaring this to be the worst film of all time, but I say it with complete sincerity. Never has a film adaptation of a novel so profoundly misunderstood its source material. In writing this review, I found myself torn between multiple desires. I wanted to write about the whitewashing of Heathcliff. I wanted to write about how the film takes Isabella, a character who in the novel is the victim of deception and subsequent abuse, and turns her into a consenting party. I wanted to write about the prevalence of classism and misogyny in the movie. However, these sins manage, somehow, to not be the film’s greatest shortcomings.
The biggest issue with the film is that it reframes Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship with one another as sexual in nature. Tempting as it might be to interpret the novel as being filled with sexual undertones, repressed only by puritanical Victorian social norms, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only do they never have sex in the book, but Catherine’s affection for Heathcliff is expressly not consciously sexual. She describes him as a source of “little visible delight,” and analogises him to a pile of ugly rocks. When she declares that “I am Heathcliff,” it is not merely a clever metaphor, nor is it meant to convey physical yearning. She is being very literal, as is he when he mirrors her monologue later (“I cannot live without my life”). They view love as a tether that can connect them in spite of boundaries like class, or even death. Love, for both of them, is the cessation of the self and any sense of personal identity.
Heathcliff spends the rest of his life fully believing that Catherine is haunting him precisely because he believes their connection is spiritual, and does not rely on sex or physical desire. The destructive nature of this type of obsession, and the fallacy of believing it when it is obviously not true, is what constitutes the thematic crux of the text. While the aforementioned dialogue features in the film, it feels strangely hollow amidst all the smut. Likewise, absent core features of the text like the faux gothic hauntings, religious subtext, and thematic emphasis on the intractability of physical boundaries. The film feels derelict, decadent, and destitute.
“Jacob Elordi-66121” by Harald Krichel is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.