Contra Contra Vishal on Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights
There just are better movies
This is my first Contra post, and so I am happy that it is a “Contra Contra,” which is a style I have always enjoyed reading by others.
This is a response to:
which is a response to:
I like both of these people, and I was part of the original screening of Wuthering Heights (2026) that Nancy references, though I only came in for the last third, and so I had to go and watch it from the beginning by myself.
So this Contra Contra is all in good fun.
I won’t answer anything either Nancy or Vishal is actually saying directly. Instead I will just riff on my memories on what my thoughts once were, impressionistically.
First of all I love dark romance, and I really love baroque, operatic, colorful films. I am somebody who actually turned on 50 Shades of Grey hoping for a certain kind of experience, realized in the first five minutes I will not get this experience, and then turned on Secretary instead. I think Jennifer’s Body is a work of genius. I keep rewatching Requiem for a Dream because apparently I am a masochist but also because it is a certain kind of colorful that I am apparently a moth towards. And so a colorful dark sexy romance based on Wuthering Heights is something that in theory should also appeal to me.
Secondly, I have not read Wuthering Heights. I started it this week but am on chapter three, and so I am incapable of criticizing or praising the film for its similarity to the book. All I can say is that the book has a certain melodic wave-like cadence to the text, that a filmmaker could have attempted to replicate as a stylistic choice — Emerald Fennell did not make a choice to do this in this film, but I do not fault her for this as that would have been a tricky choice to pull off in the best of circumstances, if one were devoting the film to having this specific similarity to the book.
I do fault her for one thing very specifically though, and that thing is not really understanding what sandbox she is playing in (or maybe understanding it fully and not caring, or understanding it and subverting it).
In any case, I consider her disregard of certain factors in her sandbox to be relevant to why even though I would be happy to rewatch Requiem for a Dream at least another five times in my lifetime, I would be surprised if I rewatched Wuthering Heights more than one more time (and that would be if I was pulled into watching it with people, for some reason of having it part of a broader conversation — and that would likely be a partial rewatching, piecemeal, not sitting down and watching the whole thing the whole way through from start to finish without pausing or standing up). And these factors have to do with how to make a film that considers the feelings of the watchers.
What are my thoughts about my experience of the film? I will start by saying a few things: there are ways that I cannot say I fully did not enjoy the film, but I also have to say that given my above comment about rewatching Requiem for a Dream, I enjoyed watching this film in part because watching this film was not enjoyable, and I haven’t watched a film I hadn’t enjoyed watching this much in quite a while, and so watching this film being painful, gave me pleasure.
If this confuses you, please turn to to this Rick and Morty clip as a reference, which itself is a parody of Hellraiser, famous for being the late-80s BDSM slasher.
What I am saying is that I did not hate my experience of watching this film because I sometimes like pain, and watching this film was painful. In fact watching this film was one of the more painful film-watching experiences I have had.
I do not know if this makes the film good. This movie was so affectively overcharged that it stayed in my mind for a week, which is…something. I cried at the end, but I do not know what I cried about. I was watching it open to being moved, but I would not say I cried because I had sympathy for the depicted characters, as much as the music and lighting elicited a crying state.
I would not even say that it makes the film interesting. I would just say that this film is affectively overcharged, and leave it at that.
Now, I am not somebody who is not a fan of affectively overcharged films. In fact, I seek them out. Some of my favorite movies include:
Santa Sangre
The Cell
Se7en
Mandy
Which are pretty famous for being…intense.
These are also horror movies. I have favorite movies that are not horror movies, but let’s stick to these. My foray into the horror genre came through a couple of people who really like horror, otherwise it would not have occurred to me that when I am looking for intense, beautiful movies that “horror” could be a key word. But when I described to these film buffs the kind of psychologically complex movies that I like, they had recommendations. Before this, all I knew was that I liked Darren Aronofsky and I liked David Lynch. (Aronofsky’s The Fountain is emblematic of the kind of really colorful, big-themed, operatic movie that you want to watch on a sick setup and is not horror at all).
I used to think that the genre of horror just meant cheap slasher flicks, but I was wrong. Something that gets psychologically dark enough, like Black Swan, gets classified as horror.
Wuthering Heights is not a horror film. But it is intense. These scenes with the eggs, the fingering of the jellied-fish, the hung man with the erection. These scenes are “edgy” and “push the edge” for I guess many genres except horror (and there may be others) for which pushing the affective edges is the point of the genre. When it comes to the kinds of intense beautiful operatic horror movies I am into, these aren’t “edgy.” These are just done…kind of badly.
What horror directors know is that they are doing something pretty delicate with the viewer, and respecting the viewer’s affective state is a big deal. They care a lot about not making literally unwatchable movies. I can rewatch Santa Sangre many times, even though it is very intense, because the ride I am going on when I watch it is a ride that the director put a lot of thought and craft into.
I also have a general notion around “does the movie work without the soundtrack” and “does the soundtrack work without the movie.” If the soundtrack is doing too much work, the movie probably is not doing enough work. The Wuthering Heights soundtrack is good enough that I listened to all of it yesterday while just wandering around on a porch. This is not a good sign. The droning strings in Walls of Sound are doing way too much work for this film. Without it the film kind of falls apart.
None of this is to say that you will hate watching Wuthering Heights (2026). You might love it. Especially if you want to be mind-nuked by something affectively saturated. I myself wanted to be mind-nuked by something, to dislodge something in my mind from my real life.
I just have a list of colorful-feeling hot dark movies I like a lot more. Starting with The Duke of Burgundy, which involves an older and younger lady butterfly scholar getting it on.