In adapting Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell has been faced with a bit of a conundrum. On the other hand this is clearly a novel that is enormously significant to her, both personally and artistically. On the other hand, it’s a novel that challenges her taste for extremity and transgression, since it’s already one of the most uncompromising texts in the English language. For a brief moment, in the opening sequence, it looks as if Fennell is going to attempt the impossible and aim for a cinematic vision that is even more brutal than Emily Bronte’s novel. The first sounds we hear in the film seem to be a couple having sex; however, the first images reveal it to be a person choking on the gallows. A young couple in the crowd gaze at this conjunction of sex and death with a frankly sensual fascination and while a nun berates them for their voyeurism, she too is overcome by the erotic pull of the gallows. Heathcliff first emerges from this space, which is presumably Liverpool, as Fennell shifs to him arriving at the moors for the first time, but the film never really returns to this transgression, as if this opening scene were enough to convince Fennell that any effort to render her vision more shocking than Bronte’s is liable to spill over into lurid self-parody.

Instead, Fennell takes the film in quite a different direction, one that we start to glean in the opening scenes, which at times retain very little of the original novel and of the original Heathcliff. Removing the double interlocuturs of the narrator and Nelly Dean (played here by Hong Chau, who isn’t really given all that much to work with) makes a big difference, especially since Nelly is a somewhat unreliable observer-instigator of the action, although this is not an uncommon choice in film adaptations, as is Fennell’s broader decision to omit the entire second half of the narrative and second generation of characters. More unusual is the complete absence of Cathy’s brother Hareton and the virtual absence of any cruelty between Cathy and Heathcliff as children, which removes the sting of their doomed romance. In fact, Margot Robbie’s Cathy is stripped of all characteristics excerpt her love for Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff while the driving force of their conflict is largely abated as well. In the novel this essentially hinges on a misunderstanding – Heathcliff overhearing Cathy (falsely) disavowing his love – but the couple clear up that error much earlier in Fennell’s version and together litigate Nelly for not having clarified the situation immediately, in real time. Add to that a gutsier rendition of Linton, and an Isabella who is played delightfully for laughs, and the most primal and brutal elements of the romance are muted and diluted.

Nevertheless, all those changes pave the way for a camp classic that digs deep into the inanity and absurdity of Bronte’s vision, even if it discards much of the pathos and poignancy. It’s ridiculous, from the outset, to accept either Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as being in their early twenties, while Elordi’s tortured accent reiterates that they’re both Queenslanders. Fennell also turns her evacuation of Bronte’s narrative into a running joke, most notably when Alison Oliver’s Isabella gives an incredulous and excruciating plot summary of Romeo and Juliet to Hareton, in what amounts to a parodic rendition of a “faithful adaptation” in her sheer determination to leave no detail unrecounted. This campy sheen leads us to the heart of Fennell’s project: a vision of Bronte’s novel hollowed out and filled in with fantasy, meaning that Wuthering Heights makes most sense as fan fiction; 50 Shades of Heathcliff (and the atmosphere in the cinema where I saw it was closer to that of 50 Shades of Grey than any film I’ve seen since; laughing, clapping, wine glasses tumbling).

What that means, in practice, is that Wuthering Heights offers a corrective to a kind of risk-managed female gaze that has arised in 2020s cinema, in which desire of any kind, but especially for anything remotely resembling “traditional” masculinity, is seen as problematic. In stark contrast, Fennell offers a softcore female gaze, a sex-adjacent, fetish lite, eminently and idiotically “tasteful” eroticism that is surprisingly disinterested in sex and instead resorts to two more infantile and primitive forms: scopophilia and self-pleasure. Most of the film’s erotic energy is expended in the act of looking – Cathy looking at Heathcliff, Heathcliff looking at Cathy and the two of them gazing at vaguely sensual tableaux unfolding before them, whether it’s gutting a pig, eating a meal, or the novel’s morally staid Joseph participating in literal horseplay with one of the maids. The thing is, this also invests the viewer’s gaze with an extraordinary intensity, suffusing the film with a jouissance that’s equally ridiculous and irresistible, comic and sublime in equal measure.

In other words, what makes Wuthering Heights so original is not its taste for transgression – indeed, to criticise it for falling short of that goal is to miss the point. Instead, this is an exercise in basic fantasy, in fantasy as a basic constituent of our lives, and of the inherent basicness of fantasy in a cinematic era where the fantasmatic self has been stripped of anything remotely aversive and held up to impossible standards of idiosyncratic individuation. Ironically, that makes it an utterly unique film in granting us access to the director’s honest fantasies for a few hours, turning it into an act of flamboyant-self pleasure from Fennell that produces a masturbatory aesthetic that renders every surface into the film a skin-surrogate. Whether it’s grass, wallpaper, dirt or eggs, every surface is enlivened, eroticised, its fetishistic potential unleashed, culminating with the wallpaper that Hareton prepares for Cathy’s bedroom, based on the contours and minutiae of her skin. Body and landscape thereby become fused, meaning that every foray onto the moors is simultaneously a recursion back into the inner folds and ridges of the body; Cathy’s first response to her sexual desire for Heathcliff is to find the highest promontory in the area and pleasure herself on it. Fennell is brilliant at substances and scenes that are held in precarious suspension, about to break forth in an ejaculatory exuberance, as when Cathy provocatively pokes her finger through a chunk of aspic into the mouth of a preserved fish.

While Fennell may sanitise the narrative, take the sting out of Heathcliff’s character and leave out huge chunks of Bronte’s vision, this is in its way an authentic solution to the question of how film an unfilmable novel – by documenting and enacting how it meets the fantasies of one particular fan. Sure, Fennell may sometimes reduce the duo to a rivals-to-lovers trope but in some deep sense that’s exactly what they are, and by carving out one particular response to the novel, she achieves a sheer imagistic power of the two against the backdrop of the moors that no other film adaptation has quite managed; there’s no doubt that the primal pull of the two leads feels absolutely true to the scale of Bronte’s vision. In the end, then, you can feel that Fennell is transfixed by the novel and, more importantly, that her own relationship with it remains unresolved – perhaps even less resolved for making the film, which dramatises it as the driving fantasy of her career but without ever managing to contain in the way that even the most experimental adaptations have done to date. The jouissance of the film finally lies in this tacit acknowledgment that Wuthering Heights still exceeds it – hence the inverted commas Fennell has placed around the title, as if this were just a draft, or one of many iterations of the novel in her oeuvre – and for a book so brutal and austere that it requires us to make up the deficit with our fantasies, a book that both punctures and reiterates the fantasy of bodice-ripping love so dissonantly that it cannot be reduced to a coherent vision, that’s the most that we can ask.