There is a two-minute section at the midpoint of‘Wuthering Heights’ that had me briefly convinced I was watching the greatest movie ever made. We watch as Margot Robbie’s Cathy wears Elton John’s sunglasses, paws at flesh-coloured walls, and skips and jumps around an eerily manicured garden straight out of Monty Don’s erotic nightmares. Charli xcx wails on the soundtrack, swaddled in reverb and metallic strings. Granted, Charli could probably belch in a soundbooth and I’d call it a banger, but still: gosh, I thought, this is cinema. But then the song ended, and Robbie – bored, randy and now for some reason dressed like Whitney Houston in 1988 – sat on some eggs and stuck her index finger into the mouth of a jellied fish. The illusion was broken. No, I concluded, this isn’t the greatest movie ever made. But it is the most Emerald Fennell movie ever made.
Fennell is today a household name as much for her films as for the things her films make us do to one another: debate; argue; slander our colleagues for their perceived cultural oafishness in the group chat. Promising Young Woman, her 2020 debut, in which Carey Mulligan donned a rainbow wig to kidnap and sternly tell off rapists and scumbags, was either an urgent, angry post-#MeToo battle cry, or too coy and gutless to be the revenge epic it wanted to be. Saltburn, her 2023 follow-up, was a Talented Mr Ripley riff either embraced for its shock and nudity and bodily fluids, or decried for being a toothless eat-the-rich trainwreck by Britain’s poshest writer/director. Maybe it was a bit of both.
