Critics unimpressed by Wuthering Heights film casting

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, known for starring in Barbie and Saltburn, are to join forces in a major new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

The Australian actors will play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the classic Emily Bronte novel, set on the tempestuous Yorkshire moors.

They may be two of Hollywood’s hottest stars, and it may be one of the most enduring love stories ever written, but their casting has left many film fans unimpressed.

“Did anyone actually read the book before deciding this?” asked the Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey.

Some pointed out that Catherine is in her teens in the book, while Heathcliff is described in the novel, written in 1847, as “dark-skinned”.

“White Heathcliff and 34-year-old Cathy, and they both look like they belong on Instagram. I’m obsessed,” wrote TV and film critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw.

She added: “Emerald Fennell does it again [derogatory].”

The Collider critic and editor Maggie Boccella vented: “It is *painfully* obvious that Fennell doesn’t actually care about Wuthering Heights’s themes.

“She just wants to make a tortured lovers drama with a name that’ll put butts in seats. As though her last two movies didn’t make that shallowness obvious already.”

The British writer and director won an Oscar for her breakthrough film Promising Young Woman in 2021, and scored a big hit last year with Saltburn, in which Elordi played the son of a rich and dysfunctional stately home-dwelling family.

Robbie produced both of those films, but Wuthering Heights will be the first Fennell film she has acted in.

The actress is currently pregnant. Variety and Deadline reported that the new film will start shooting in the UK next year.

Little is known about how Fennell plans to adapt the 1847 story of turbulent and tragic romance.

She announced the film in July with a gothic illustration depicting two skeletons alongside a line from Heathcliff from the book: “Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad.”

“Looking forward to their Yorkshire accents,” joked writer Lisa Holdsworth about the two stars.

Not everyone was completely down on the idea. “Praying for another pristine round of high camp melodrama trash from Fennell,” wrote film critic Scott Clark.

In the book, Heathcliff was found starving and homeless as a child on the streets of Liverpool and adopted by the Earnshaw family.

His ancestry is ambiguous, and he is described in the book as “a dark-skinned gipsy” and “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”. Lascar is an old term for an East Indian sailor.

Heathcliff and Catherine become embroiled in an impassioned and turbulent obsession, which leads to a web of unhealthy relationships and tragedy.

While some see Heathcliff as the brooding romantic hero, he is also violent, abusive and manipulative.

The novel has been adapted for the screen numerous times.

The last film came out in 2011 and was made by director Andrea Arnold, starring Skins actress Kaya Scodelario as Catherine and James Howson as Heathcliff.

Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes appeared in a 1992 version.

On TV, in 2009, ITV cast Tom Hardy as Heathcliff and Charlotte Riley as his doomed love interest.