‘Wuthering Heights’ is a bold, filthy fantasy — but these moors need more erotic heat

Turn-ons of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” include raw eggs, rainstorms, dog collars, horse bridles, paper mushrooms and aspic-smothered fish — a caricature of lust that befits this unconvincingly erotic adaptation of a Victorian-era novel written by a virgin. Emily Brontë died at age 30, the year after its publication, still shielding herself under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell and knowing so little of sex that she’d written only the faintest allusions to it in her unnerving vivisection of romantic obsession. (Unless you giggle at how the dialogue isn’t merely “said,” it’s “ejaculated.”)

Like besotted fan fiction, Fennell (“Promising Young Woman,” “Saltburn”) adds the erotic scenes herself in this crisscrossed foursome between Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), a wild pair who have crushed on each other since he was a foundling, and their more-marriable posh neighbors, Edgar (Shazad Latif) and Isabella (Alison Oliver). The script also stirs in a BDSM tryst between two servants in a stable.

Technically, this is not “Wuthering Heights,” but “Wuthering Heights” in the self-referential quotation marks on the poster, an acknowledgment that Fennell has plunged her fingers into the plot and manipulated it to her whims. She’s cut the book in half and the characters too. With the siblings and in-laws and various inbred offsprings dismissed, these moors are lonelier than ever, making the action both easier to follow than in the original novel and easier to buy. Of course everyone here is hot for each other. What else is there to do?

Here young Catherine and Heathcliff, played as moppets by Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper (who just won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for “Adolescence”), respectively, are raised cowering from Catherine’s father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), a drunk born into a once-prestigious lineage who has gambled away the family’s fortune and standing. Foul and stinging, Clunes plays his abusive patriarch like a scorpion pickled in tequila.

The first 20 minutes couldn’t be better as it lays the groundwork for a world in which violence and passion commingle in the mud. Even the opening credits, some written in slithering hair, seem to tremble out of either fear or ecstasy. It’s all fittingly itchy for literature’s most aggravating couple and a story that chafes against the convention that love wins — or even that love is good.

Fennell begins on a black screen and the sound of creaks and moans. Having seen (and loved) her previous kinky-cruel films, I readied myself for her to reveal a morbid prank. But I gasped at her execution: not just a close-up of a hanged man, but one who dies inhaling his shroud so that his corpse resembles a blow-up doll.

The movie’s first sequence is a Boschian wet dream in which wenches flash their bosoms at the gallows as though they’re at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Ostensibly, it’s a formative experience for wee Cathy and Heathcliff, who will soon cling together in a cold house. Like the moths of nearby Manchester that evolved from white to black to survive the Industrial Revolution, they’re products of their filthy environment.

So it’s bizarre when “Wuthering Heights” cuts to them as adults and Robbie and Elordi, who have a combined real-life age of 63, are still platonically romping around like children. Their flirtation comes across less as will they or won’t they do it, and more do they even know what it is?

Gauging from the logic of the film, they don’t. There’s a scene in which Catherine and Heathcliff discover two underlings canoodling and the biological mechanics seem to wow them like the monolith in “2001”: Here is a shiny new idea that’s never occurred to them.

Alas, their comically neutered immaturity has grown-up consequences. Cathy gets engaged to Latif’s mild-mannered Edgar before she and her playmate can try sex out and, in vengeance, Heathcliff catches the attention of Oliver’s Isabella. Meanwhile, Catherine’s ignored handmaid, Nelly (Hong Chau), inserts herself into everyone’s drama out of pique. As was the lesson of “Saltburn,” never antagonize a minion.

Despite the heavy breathing, Heathcliff and Catherine’s chemistry is pretty vanilla. His masochistic affair with Isabella is the one that makes your skin prickle. The gutsy, giddy Oliver goes all-in on performing her character just as Brontë described: “She degenerates into a mere slut.” Finally, it feels like Fennell went spelunking for eroticism and actually found some.

Elordi strides naturally through the film’s burning-of-Atlanta orange sunscapes and its grasslands stabbed by obsidian spikes of rock. An oversized throwback of a leading man, he’s suited for larger-than-life period roles and figures whose very existence seems like a fluke: a shy boy from Tupelo who becomes a rock icon (“Priscilla”), an intelligent assemblage of dead body parts (“Frankenstein”) and here, an urchin who mysteriously manages to turn himself into a tycoon.

Robbie struggles, although in fairness, Catherine is an impossible role. (Bodice-ripping broody rich guys are a dime a dozen.) You might remember from English class that Brontë unspools her saga at a gossipy remove: Decades after the lovers are dead, Nelly is telling a stranger her perspective on the ménage as blurred through her own animosity. Viewed through the disgruntled servant’s bias, the 17-year-old Catherine of the book appears monstrous and mythic. But up close and personal (and in hipster red sunglasses), she’s simply a shallow brat — a time-traveling reality show villain that we could enjoy more snarkily if Fennell wasn’t forcing her to posture like a tragedienne.

The trouble with bypassing an age-appropriate teen actor in favor of a proven, thrice Oscar-nominated movie star like Robbie (who, let me be clear, I would carve right now on Hollywood’s Mount Rushmore) is that by doing so, you make her look ridiculous. I tried, and failed, to merge Robbie’s miscasting into the film’s delirious artificiality alongside the apple-sized strawberries, the gowns of opalescent and latexy fabrics, and Edgar’s cuckoo mansion where shiny red floors bleed into bedrooms with flesh-toned wallpaper that pulses with blue veins.

The bravura production and costume design are respectively by Suzie Davies and Jacqueline Durran, both correctly tipping the outrageous into the tacky. These aren’t characters with good sense. Rain soaks everyone to the skin every day, yet no one remembers an umbrella.

Fennell seems to imagine Catherine as a proto-Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind,” except that Brontë didn’t give her flawed heroine as many options. Wind-swept Catherine is as constrained by societal mores as geographic ones. But Scarlett wanted her childhood sweetheart and her family estate (Catherine doesn’t care if hers burns to the ground) and instead of moping, commits wickedness and her own calculated marriages to get them.

Catherine, meanwhile, is just a drag. The line that got my favorite laugh is when she accuses Nelly of enjoying her tears and Nelly snaps back, “Not half as much as you like crying.”

Fennell continues to have a gift for exposing the sordidness of money and power. Robbie’s most deliciously debasing scene is when she throws coins on the ground for a desperate beggar — and then that person forces her to watch as he picks them up. The tension is horrible and fantastic. So, too, is the film’s music, composer Anthony Willis and soundtrack artist Charlie XCX entwining raspy strings with grimy, ominous shudders.

Though “Wuthering Heights” is a phony tease, I’m grateful that Fennell wants to titillate audiences. If they show up, they’ll help her convince the industry to move past chasing superheroes in codpieces and make more movies about messy, marvelous human sweat. The box office isn’t my personal kink; movie reviews are where you and I meet to talk about what gets us hot and bothered. But I hope Fennell, and other hedonistic filmmakers like her, get to keep whipping blockbusters out of their doldrums.

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