Emerald Fennell is good, actually

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.

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Neither sparked quite as much outrage, though, as her Wuthering Heights, which seemed to generate worry and backlash from its initial announcement, straight through to its release. Now in cinemas, the film ultimately guts the messy complexity of Emily Brontë’s source material, makes the probably-not-white Heathcliff very, very white, and transforms his and Cathy Linton’s brutish dynamic of lust and loathing into basic, Fifty Shades kink. Our critic Clarisse Loughrey called it “astonishingly hollow”; others have been even more vitriolic. But I couldn’t help but like the thing, in all its exhausting, pop-video juvenilia. And, by proxy, like Fennell herself.

Fennell speaks like the unholy offspring of Leslie Phillips and a bag of oyster forks, and has the face of someone who absolutely knows how to use an Aga. “I’m basically playing a chain-smoking posho standing in a corner making cutting remarks,” she once said, about her acting role as Queen Camilla in The Crown. “It’s not a stretch.” To defend her feels a bit like committing class treachery. My mother did not get chased by a police horse in the poll tax riots for whatever I’m putting to print right now. But for all her limitations as a scriptwriter (she has a big third-act problem, her three movies all opening with stirring, compelling set-ups before fizzling out), Fennell is also a very fun filmmaker to watch and think about – she’s a woman so almost-good that her films make for great chatter, and there’s a sumptuous opulence to how she stages her scenes and costumes her stars that makes her work always worth seeing.

Still, she’s largely been declared a person it’s socially acceptable – or even encouraged – to very loudly lambast, like Chris Pratt or Meghan Markle, possibly because she’s posh (which, sure, go for it), or possibly because she exists in a bit of a vacuum. No one particularly makes films like she does right now, and certainly not on such a scale, and few directors seem so attuned to the zeitgeist. A few days ago, I saw what must have been a 80-strong queue of people (many of whom were young women) lining up to enter a Wuthering Heights installation on London’s South Bank to affix “love locks” to an artificial trellis. It seemed sort of maddeningly pointless, but also exciting and participatory in ways that a lot of expensive cinema sadly isn’t today. People want to see Fennell’s movies, which may explain why it’s so easy for her detractors to drag them.

Fennell makes YouTube supercut cinema, as if some of the greatest hits of her formative years have been chopped and screwed into a showreel. In Wuthering Heights, for instance, there’s a direct lift of Keanu Reeves soaking in the rain in Point Break, lifts of Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic costume romp Marie Antoinette, lifts of the Nineties Chanel No 5 ad where Red Riding Hood breaks into a bank vault. Poor Isabella Linton is rendered here a girlish dolt with a humiliation fetish, and I couldn’t help but see shades there of Selma Blair’s girlish dolt in Cruel Intentions (one of Fennell’s favourite films, I should add). Everything in Wuthering Heights is a bit like something else, but with a head injury. I giggled when Cathy is briefly dolled up like some kind of Oktoberfest serving wench, and later when she’s surrounded by a halo of leeches in bed. I giggled at the room with the red glazed floorboards, glistening beneath our heroes’ feet like a sexy cheesecake. And I giggled most of all at the literal mountains of bottles surrounding Martin Clunes’s boozed and bloated corpse, a moment so nakedly over the top that I almost began clapping at the screen.

Fennell is an expert at this kind of luxe silliness, shots built for Pinterest boards and the folders of screenshots saved up in your Photos app. She is a fantastic stylist – this generation’s Adrian Lyne, really, who dominated the Eighties and Nineties with low-brow but outrageously sleek erotic dramas like Indecent Proposal and 9 ½ Weeks. There is a scene in the latter film in which Kim Basinger performs a striptease to Joe Cocker’s cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, while Mickey Rourke marvels. It’s a ludicrously indulgent moment purely there to be eye candy and cause a stir, and it works majestically because its aspirations aren’t any higher than that – and is that not more or less true of the final scene of Saltburn? With Barry Keoghan pirouetting starkers around a country house to “Murder On the Dancefloor”?

The worst thing to happen to Fennell was Covid, which drastically cut the amount of movies competing for awards attention in 2021, and therefore propelled Promising Young Woman out of the box it probably should have stayed in (pulpy little cult favourite; Letterboxd fave) and into a far more more gilded one (five Oscar noms, a Best Original Screenplay win for Fennell herself).

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The film’s improbable success vaunted Fennell into the sphere of Millennial Auteurs that includes the likes of Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig and Robert Eggers – moviemakers with distinct visual and storytelling fingerprints, who speedily found themselves being able to sell movies and (generally) original ideas more or less on name recognition alone. But Fennell’s movies sit uneasily alongside the likes of Peele’s Get Out or Gerwig’s Lady Bird, not only in terms of quality but in terms of the ideas they’re conveying. Fennell likes texture and bombast, cheek and iconography. Her scripts are slick and silly, puddle deep and thematically threadbare. She likes stunts. She’s basically a modern William Castle, the B-movie king who’d install plastic skeletons in cinemas screening his House on Haunted Hill to swing down upon terrified audiences. I’m sure Wuthering Heights would have made brilliant use of Smell-O-Vision, with cinemas pumping odours into screening rooms. Freshly mown grass. A horse stable. Some historically-inaccurate-but-who-cares strawberry lubricant in the air whenever Jacob Elordi gets groiny. Think of the possibilities!

This is Fennell’s sweet spot, and I don’t see her transcending it any time soon – nor should she, honestly. She is a maker of popcorn cinema – big, splashy, reliably entertaining froth that favours literalism over subtlety. She is the Garth Marenghi of cinematic sex. She knows writers who use subtext and thinks they’re all cowards. Asked by Charli XCX recently if she’d ever visited the Criterion Closet – a popular video series in which stars select their favourite films from the often auteurist selection put out by the distribution company Criterion – Fennell cringed. “They won’t let me in that closet,” she replied. “They know I’ll be, like, ‘what is this?’” And that’s fine. We need people like her, whose forte is commercial glitz.

Wuthering Heights, then, is Emerald Fennell unleashed, a marvellously asinine exercise in style and panache, both as sumptuous and breathtaking as it is completely terrible. It’s like a birthday cake that tastes like garbage. A 20-room mansion made of sticks. I absolutely adored it, then actively despised it. Then back again. Job done, really. Long may her reign of terror continue.

‘Wuthering Heights’ is in cinemas