A poor young English boy named Heathcliff is taken in by the wealthy Earnshaw family where he develops an intense relationship with his young foster sister, Cathy. Based on the classic novel by Emily Bronte.
Stripping the story of romance and trying to make a statement about man and nature proves both pointless and self-defeating.
Passionate and faithful, Arnold’s film is striking but staggers toward a lethargic climax.
An astonishing-looking adaptation that captures the setting of the book, and its darkness, wonderfully, but goes too far towards edgy in its quest to avoid the usual literary clichés.
Arnold’s film is a rebuke to previous genteel period treatments, but in the end it doesn’t hit any heights.
The film never builds on the potential of its earliest sequences, instead growing repetitive, and it crucially fails to express the heartache of the doomed central romance.
Though often beautiful in its harshness, and undeniably truer to the original than any of the other 16 screen incarnations, you may find Arnold’s picture one that’s easier to admire than to swoon over.
Forget Kate Bush’s flailing gothic fancies – Arnold’s lit-pic embraces the novel’s rough-hewn core and emotional cataclysms head on.
The film gave me something I never expect to get from any classic literary adaptation: the shock of the new.
Arrestingly shot in natural light, with no soundtrack, the moors have never seemed more alien or bleak and this does stay with you but at over two hours long it’s rather hard work.
I loved it – although I suspect Brontë fans who think the most admirable take on her novel to date is the musical version starring Cliff Richard in a self-adhesive beard will choke on the film like it’s a misshapen mint humbug.
In this movie there is too much photogenic, too little feral and, sadly, no Heathcliff worthy of the name.
Some viewers may baulk at such liberties, yet there is something irresistible in Arnold's commitment to the practice of showing rather than telling. Her sense of place, no less than in the lowering Glasgow estate of Red Road and the Essex badlands of Fish Tank, is magnificently particular.
Deserves a lot of credit for approaching sacred source material in such a radical form.
The withering depths.
Blusters of bleak northern wind stand in for dialogue and, frankly, sheer boredom substitutes for Bronte's look into the riddles of the human heart.
The movie never recovers its early power and at times becomes confused, ponderous, and risible.
We get no sense of grown-up connection between the leads until Cathy is on her deathbed. This dark, near-silent film is just too grim to be borne.
As bare and haunting as the landscape in which it is set, and all the more memorable for it.
Wuthering Heights realises Bronte's vision with its dark-skinned Heathcliff
Dark depths of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights
How Heathcliff got a 'racelift'
General release. Check local listings for show times.
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday December 9, 2011, until Wednesday December 14, 2011. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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