Wuthering Heights

A Yorkshire hill farmer on a visit to Liverpool finds a homeless boy on the streets. He takes him home to live as part of his family on the isolated Yorkshire moors where the boy forges an obsessive relationship with the farmer’s daughter.
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No starched lace, no panoramic views, no sweeping score — Andrea Arnold has reinvented Wuthering Heights. She takes Emily Brontë’s classic novel and strips it to the root of youthful passion, restoring the stark power of the story. Following her bracing portraits of female desire in Red Road and Fish Tank, Arnold pushes even further with Wuthering Heights, portraying love as a rush of heartstopping beauty, cruelty and impulsive acts.

In a remote farmhouse on Yorkshire’s nineteenth-century moors, Mr. Earnshaw brings home a wary biracial boy, whom he names Heathcliff. Adopted into the family under Christian values, Heathcliff’s new presence is met with mixed feelings. Hindley, Earnshaw’s teenaged son, treats him with contempt, while Catherine, Hindley’s younger sister, embraces the outsider with curious warmth. An intense relationship begins to form between Heathcliff and Catherine as they play on the moor. Their pleasant days are brought to an abrupt end, however, with Mr. Earnshaw’s death. Hindley takes control of the farm and drives Heathcliff away. Edgar, the son of a wealthy neighbouring family, courts Catherine in marriage. Torn between love and reason, Catherine’s decision sets the three of them on a tragic course.

Avoiding the typical pleasantries of period romance, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights uses natural sounds in place of a score, emphasizing the rhythms of wind, voices and silence. Arnold places Catherine and Heathcliff within a specific and sometimes harsh environment; the effect is to bring Brontë’s characters closer to nature. Handheld camera work captures every look and touch exchanged between the passionate young lovers, swaying and darting into the wet black mud one minute, carried aloft with a bird the next.

Arnold’s two previous features established her as a remarkable new voice in cinema, a filmmaker unwilling to lean on clichés about love, insisting instead on a brutal version of truth. By cutting Brontë’s novel back to its essence of longing and injustice, she revives the story for a contemporary audience.