Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, released at the beginning of the year, turned Emily Brontë’s novel of brutal abuse and doomed love into a campy BDSM melodrama while clumsily erasing the original’s racial dynamics and insights. Becca Hirani’s Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned doesn’t replicate Fennell’s. It’s, instead, a failure in a completely different, clunkier, but no less thoroughgoing way.
For unaccountable reasons, Hirani chose to center the movie on Mr. Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) the hapless tenant of Thrushcross Grange. In the novel, Lockwood serves as the oblivious framing narrator of the tragedy of the forbidden love between adopted, racialized Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) and Catherine (Elle O’Hara.) In House of the Damned, though, he’s the main character, and main victim. He visits Wuthering Heights to greet the owner of the land on which he’s situated, is insulted, and then quickly succumbs to the ill influences of Heathcliff’s mansion of spookery.
Those spookeries are scattershot and rapidly multiplying, as if Hirani is desperate to let you know that she’s shooting a horror movie here. There are ghosts, serial killers, body horror, nightmare visions, and, in the tradition of Psycho and many another film in the genre, there’s cross-dressing and homosexuality deployed to show Just How Bad Things Have Gotten.
It's possible that Hirani intended to suggest parallels between queer relationships and the forbidden love of Heathcliff and Catherine. But the film is too diffuse and confused to make that metaphor connect. Brontë’s words come out of character’s mouths, expressing the torment and pain of overbearing love. But with so much screentime for the hesitant, snickering, unappealing Lockwood, there’s little space for the movie to describe or illustrate the contours of the relationship that supposedly powers the movie. We don’t see Catherine and Heathcliff’s love develop; we don’t see it sour; we don’t even meet Edward Linton, the man Catherine marries, or understand why he’s attractive to her and simultaneously insufficient.
Similarly, maidservant Nelly (Nicola Wright) is robbed of her buried malevolence. Mr. Earnshaw’s (Simon Weir) vacillating altruism and cruelty is approached in only a single, ineffectual scene. As for Heathcliff, he becomes a standard horror villain—unstoppable, mad, and therefore semi-anonymous. He’s less sympathetic and less frightening with his actions divorced from reason and calculation. He’s not a person but a trope, and as a result the (racist) cruelty inflicted upon him, and the cruelty he inflicts, is disconnected from each other and from any real emotional payoff.
Wuthering Heights is a complicated novel, whose twisted plot and nested unreliable narration winds around, parallels, and throttles its themes of ingrown passion, strangled desire, self-deception and self-wounding. It’s a much more difficult work to adapt than, say, Jane Austen’s novels, not least because current romcom themes map more easily onto past romance novels than the current horror genre fits into throwback gothic. Translating Emily Brontë into the idiom of present day feature film is no mean feat, and it’s not a surprise that various creators have stumbled in trying.
But while the missteps here are understandable, that doesn’t make the movie any more enjoyable. Fans of the original novel will be baffled and frustrated that Hirani doesn’t seem to know who the story’s supposed to be about, much less what to do with it. Fans of horror will be irritated as one hoary cliché after another is wheeled out (the ghost passing in the background when the protagonist is looking the wrong way; the creeping body growths that must be disgustingly popped; the ritual murders) almost at random, with no special innovation or visual panache, much less logic. Maybe someone, someday will manage a Wuthering Heights adaptation worthy of the original. But not this year.