Wuthering Heights is a bosom-heaving, gasp-inducing thrill ride

Wuthering Heights is resplendently lurid, oozy and wild: Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie star as Heathcliff and Cathy. Photo / Getty Images

You could never accuse Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights of being a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – but then fidelity doesn’t appear to be remotely of interest to it.

Resplendently lurid, oozy and wild, the new film from the director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman is fixated on its central illicit affair, as conducted by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, to the exclusion of almost all else.

It’s an obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions.

We’re in rural 18th-century Yorkshire, but if it wasn’t for the heather, it might as well be the surface of Mars.

These boulder-strewn moors make a lonely playground for young Catherine Earnshaw (gutsy newcomer Charlotte Mellington), who lives at a remote, crumbling grange with her increasingly drunken, destitute father: a fusion of the book’s Mr Earnshaw and his sadistic eldest son Hindley, played with scrofulous elan by Martin Clunes.

One boozy night, Earnshaw returns with a foundling: this is Heathcliff, played as a child by Owen Cooper, the young star of Adolescence. The lad soon becomes Cathy’s playmate, but beneath their knockabout adoptive-sibling union bubbles something dark and taboo.

This only intensifies when the narrative leaps forward a decade or so; the adult Cathy (Robbie) has grown into a Victorian babe extraordinaire, while a longer, broader, hairier Heathcliff (Elordi) snuffles and clumps around the estate like a sexed-up bison.

The couple’s chemistry is hot and at times genuinely transgressive, while their marked difference in height – Elordi is 6ft 5in (1.87m), Robbie 5ft 6in (1.58m) – generates its own sort of zoological frisson.

Do they look much like 19th-century moor-dwellers? No. But, as in the 1967 adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd, with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, Fennell makes a virtue of the clash.

Trysts are underscored with a series of breathy electro-ballads from Charli XCX. Race-blind casting opens up fruitful new angles on familiar characters: Shazad Latif is superb as Cathy’s suitor Linton, here a hesitant, nouveau riche nice guy; and Hong Chau is just as good as Nelly, her watchful lady’s companion, whose mixed bloodline creates its own complications.

The era-straddling sets and costumes share a gasp-inducing sugar-high aesthetic: Jean-Honoré Fragonard meets Juicy Couture.

Is it as lewd as Saltburn? I’d say it’s lewder, if slightly less graphic. In some ways, it’s a traditional bodice-ripper – bosoms heave, flanks trickle with sweat – though again, bodily fluids are savoured, while Saltburn’s Alison Oliver makes a devilishly funny and unsettling return as Miss Isabella, Linton’s initially meek and genteel ward.

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right.

Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

In cinemas from February 12

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