Cathy (Margot Robbie) has a moment in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (all images courtesy of Warner Bros.)

I love fan fiction. While I never wrote it as a confused teen (No, I’m not covering up a secret, long-dormant account on Fanfiction.net. I’ve never been good at fiction), I love it nonetheless. Fan fiction is an art form born out of obsession, raging hormones, and pent-up wayward desire projected through favorite fictional characters and beloved band members. I like that it’s out there, fucking up the canon by encouraging Batman and Joker to make up with a make-out sesh (an immovable object banging an unstoppable force) or transforming K-Pop groups into polycules. What makes fan fiction, especially erotic fan fiction, so superb is the unfiltered horniness that creates some of the worst sex writing imaginable—copious emotive dry humping; a misunderstanding of human anatomy; odd, deeply unsexy BDSM encounters; bizarre erotic play that teens imagine is hot. Of course, this may be different now as everyone’s eyeballs have been soaked in a vat of porn since they were handed an iPad at birth, but in my old-fuck millennial days, fan fiction was raw, randy, and reckless with its source material, while also being endearingly naïve.

This is why I wholeheartedly love Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or to use its meta scare-quoted title from the opening credits, “Wuthering Heights.” Fennell’s Wuthering Heights can only be understood and appreciated as the highest budget work of millennial fan fiction ever produced. And for that alone, it’s admirable, capturing the sex-crazed desire and histrionics of a Livejournal series. I recognize I’m (yet again) alone here and am starting to become one of Emerald Fennell’s biggest defenders. Part of the reason may be that I barely remember the film’s original material, Emily Brontë’s high school reading list classic, which I read over twenty years ago. All I recall is that Heathcliff seemed like a real asshole. So, unlike the copious English majors and classic lit scolds shouting into the digital void about the film’s rather loose interpretation of the cherished novel, I really could not give less of a fuck. We’re in World War III—let people enjoy some grand, overblown, horny 11th-grade fan fiction, you grumps!

And boy, Wuthering Heights is horny, albeit in its own wacked-out way, as evidenced by the eye-and-boner-popping opening scene. The film doesn’t start on those grand rolling Yorkshire moors so often associated with cinematic depictions of Brontë’s novel. Instead, Fennell plunges the audience into a stinking, grimy, mud-slicked city, crammed with haggard soot-smudged faces who have gathered in the town square to gawk at a public execution. The lookie-loos certainly receive the brutal peep show they wanted as the executed dangles from a noose, a hood over his head, while, through his scratchy pants, a prominent erection stands at attention. As anti-erotic as this asphyxiation seems, the cock-out carnage revs up the audience as several in the crowd start sucking face. As you do! A twosome joins these violent voyeurs, still too young to fully appreciate the perverse pleasure on display: child Catherine Earnshaw, played by Charlotte Mellington, who is upstaged by her own ratty platinum wig, and her paid frienemy Nelly (Vy Nguyen). The duo respond to the death drive orgy by racing back to the Wuthering Heights moors—though this scene also delivers a stunner, John Cale’s Welsh accent lilting over his viola and Charli xcx’s electro-pop sludge to obliquely gasp, “Am I living in another world? Another world I created? For what?!” recalling his ghoulish love-sick fable “The Gift,” from The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. I mean, what the fuck was THAT?! Other than a later gleeful reference to an execution, this introductory scene feels as if it were yanked from a different movie entirely. It’s as if Fennell ingested all those film-bros insisting that the tub cum slurping in her prior Saltburn didn’t live up to shock value masters like Pasolini and responded, “Watch this!”

Heathcliff is afraid of her wig

I’ll admit, I was a tad disappointed that this cinematic punishment doesn’t rear its ugly head again, replaced by the allure of the film’s otherwise overarching excessive kitsch romanticism. Before that, Fennell gets all the exposition out of the way as be-wigged child Catherine discovers a random grubby boy under her bed. Like a pet, she names him Heathcliff after her dead brother, an explanation she provides to her alchy dad as if he doesn’t recognize the source, a script note so glaring I could see the red ink from my theater seat (“The audience doom-scrolling need context!”). This is all rather perfunctory and forgettable until Margot Robbie’s adult Catherine makes her first appearance in a laughably dramatic entrance, wearing, what appears to be, a dress she ripped off a bier frau during Oktoberfest (Can I get a pilsner and a pretzel, Cathy?). Thankfully, this is just one of many scene-chewing Catherine entrances in increasingly ridiculous Halloween store rental costumes, which made me howl each time. Not to be outdone, her adopted lovesick sorta-brother Heathcliff, played by heartthrob Jacob Elordi, grew up too, now sporting a parched, shaggy Abbey Road-era Beatles wig and beard.

Cathy and Heathcliff spend their days daydreaming about what would happen if they got married to a rich person; hiding eggs in bedsheets; and gazing at each other longingly through windows. Both Robbie, who is thirty-five, and Elordi, who is twenty-eight, are way too old to pull off their characters’ flighty, immature behavior, an endlessly hilarious sight gag that is only heightened once Cathy discovers sex in her mid-thirties. She’s introduced to intercourse by watching her servants Joseph (Evan Mitchell) and Zillah (Amy Morgan) giggle their way through horseplay using actual riding equipment. Catching Cathy curiously peeping through the floorboards, Heathcliff quietly lies on top of her, grabbing her eyes and mouth to prevent her from witnessing the sinful deed, a dominating act so thigh-clampingly erotic that it outshines any actually explicit penetrative sex scene on film I can recall. Cathy obviously thinks so, too. After an amusingly slick transition with the viscous ooze of a slug trail slithering across the screen, Cathy dissociates while staring at bread being sensually kneaded and flees to the moors to rub one out in private. We get it, Cathy!

As hot as Cathy and Heathcliff’s love games are, their will-they-or-won’t-they sorta incestual relationship takes a turn after the arrival of wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton, a sadly sweet sap played by Shazad Latif, and his zany, googly-eyed ward Isabella (a scene-stealing Alison Oliver). A loss for Cathy and Heathcliff is the audience’s gain as Linton’s entry into this emotionally exhausting love triangle inspires Fennell to lean into the film’s kitsch maximalism HARD, starting with the first encounter between Cathy and Edgar. Ever the peeper, Cathy peers over Linton’s fence to stare into his lush Rococo garden, spying Edgar enduring Isabella’s breathless diatribe about Romeo and Juliet (of note, the twenty-eight-year-old Oliver is also too old to be acting this way). After a commotion, Edgar discovers Cathy sprawled with a sprained ankle, framed by a haze of flowers and greenery in what I can only describe as Fragonard as interpreted by a mass-market dollar store romance novel cover illustrator. All that was missing was Fabio.

Note the earring

This is just the beginning of Fennell’s breathtakingly overwrought aesthetics. Heathcliff grumpily gallops into an overblown orange Gone with the Wind sunset after overhearing Cathy whining to poor long-suffering Nelly (Hong Chau) about her decision to marry Edgar. Cathy takes a wind-whipped slo-mo stroll on the moors in a wedding dress that doesn’t even appear to be the same one in which she takes her vows (a Shein plastic nightmare). Edgar shows Cathy around his uniquely theatrically threatening interior decorating that reaches its most serial-killer-alarming in her bedroom, which is flocked with puffy fabric recreating the skin on her face, including moles, freckles, and veins (“Here look, the freckle from your cheek!” Gee, thanks, nutjob!). Edgar balances his deranged design sense with an amusingly camp dinner menu that primarily consists of aspics, as if he’s a 1950s and 1960s housewife on too many dolls. Speaking of dolls, little oddball Isabella still plays with dolls at nearly thirty, making Cathy her own Barbie using hair she individually collected from her brush. Heathcliff’s inevitable return is also terrifically tacky. He arrives now mysteriously wealthy, as indicated by…a new flashy gold earring! Like he spent his years away at a Claire’s. The earring alone is a detail so absurdly trashy that it could only come from Fennell, which is why I love her ceaselessly and unapologetically.

Now, some may whine about Fennell’s attempt at a romantic cinematic epic curdling, instead, into blockbuster tastelessness. But not me! Sure, the movie’s long montages, including one with Cathy munching on a giant overripe, oversized Erewhon strawberry, feel like a Brontë-themed music video, especially with the indiscriminate insertion of Charli xcx’s anachronistic set of atonal original pop songs, which I like much more than 2024’s mid-bender strut, brat. But, I’ve never refused the appeal of movies that resemble elaborate perfume ads (*cough* Spencer). I also won’t deny that Fennell’s choices, from the earring to Catherine’s wacko dresses to the set design to even the casting of Margot Robbie’s perfectly 21st-century Instagram face, are so hyper-exaggerated and artificial that it feels as if Fennell is playing with the dolls in Isabella’s stunted dollhouse rather than producing a period piece. The doll effect is only heightened by the fact that Catherine has little personality beyond being obstinate, and Heathcliff is nowhere near as much of a dick as he needs to be to live up to various people’s warnings. But, both Elordi and Robbie are so beautiful that who cares? Like Fennell playing with dolls, I, too, want to press them together. Now kiss!

Paging Freud!

This brings me to the film’s fan-fictionalized fucking, which, despite Heathcliff and Catherine’s dynamic tension and mutual obsession, mainly consists of never-nude dry humping and stuffing fingers in each other’s mouths (the latter oral fixation also inspires another dreadful design moment in Edgar’s estate featuring reliefs of a woman’s head, resembling Catherine, with pearls tumbling from her gaping maw). The standout pervert performance isn’t the central duo at all, but little sicko Isabella, whose gnawing horniness comes out in endearingly berserk ways, like a self-produced illustrated book filled with yonis and pop-up penises. When Heathcliff, seeking revenge against Catherine, turns his sights on Isabella, she can’t believe her luck and leaps headfirst into a leash for some winking puppy play (to Nelly’s head-in-hands dismay), a Brontë-defying kink that has all the English majors’ panties in a twist (is it MORE feminist that Isabella is into it rather than gets abused? I’m not sure.). Despite the sheer amount of erotic escapades, there is something strangely chaste about all these sex scenes, as if they were written by a virgin in a study hall. Before the film was released, a rumor circulated around X that it would conclude with a twist: a teen drifting off into fantasyland rather than paying attention in high-school English. Though Wuthering Heights does actually come off that way, I’m so glad Fennell didn’t go for the obvious. Instead, the film exists in such a bonkers state of off-kilter unreality that not even pregnancy means growing a belly.

All of which should serve to distance the audience from being pulled into Wuthering Heights’ fantasy, but it doesn’t. Sure, I have some complaints, primarily one late shot that is so overdetermined and posed, reminiscent of all the saintly scenes in Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, that it yanked me out of the movie entirely. Yet, that was only a momentary flicker. Instead, Fennell’s ability to grab the audience’s emotional attention, even amid all her kitsch extravaganza, was responsible for perhaps the funniest audience reaction I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing. For as many ironic snickers snuffling their way through the film (including mine), by the movie’s tragic conclusion, the audience was in it. Pin-drop silent with only a few scattered weepy sniffles. Then, as the credits rolled, the entire theater burst into laughter. Catharsis! She got us! I can’t think of a better endorsement.