As with much of the classic literature I read in high school and college, Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights remains in my memory as more of a vibe than a story, and I imagine it’s this dynamic that director Emerald Fennell is working with in her new adaptation. The particulars of the torrid relationship between the heir to the titular Yorkshire estate, Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), and the urchin-of-no-known-provenance, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), adopted by her alcoholic, ineffectual father (Martin Clunes), have mostly evaporated with time, leaving behind vague memories of heaving emotions and eternally dark heavy weather. That’s mostly what we get from Fennell, along with a uniquely eye-popping production design that means to own the story for anyone who watches this particular movie version. I’ve never been the kind of filmgoer who begrudges a director their right to tell an already established property in their own way, and, truth be told, Bronte’s novel was never my cup of tea, so I was free to accept its peculiar charms in the way they were presented. I was also free to reject them.

The purple melodramatics make sense, especially in the beginning, when our two would-be lovers are children who simply offer each other a challenging companionship based on their sense of grievance with their respective lots—Heathcliff’s impoverished, stationless resentment versus Cathy’s empty entitlement owing to the simple stark fact that she’s female. They have no one else on this blasted heath but each other, and so when they’re grown and Cathy is married off to her wealthy neighbor, Linton (Shazad Latif), after Heathcliff self-exiles in a huff to make something of himself, the breach feels monumental, setting the stakes high for the latter’s return some years later as a nouveau riche epicurean whose best revenge is buying the now broken down estate where he was raised in order to taunt the woman who lives in moneyed misery next door with his newly elevated social status and disposable income. Having lopped off the last entire third of the book, Fennell is free to fill most of the movie’s run time with the central pair’s semi-incestuous reacquaintance, which amounts to a lot of moist sexual activity and hot emoting that flies over the head of Linton but hardly escapes the notice of Cathy’s lifelong personal servant, Nelly (Hong Chau), whose role in the unfolding tragedy is inflated to Hitchcockian proportions. Whatever nuance of romantic intrigue Bronte intended for the pair’s couplings is substituted with the most brazen class-conscious silliness. Moreover, during the second half of the film Cathy and Heathcliff are almost never apart physically or psychically. How can you miss someone the way you profess to miss them when neither of you will go away?

Then, of course, Heathcliff has the audacity to travel the extra Harlequin distance by boning Linton’s heretofore innocent younger sister (Alison Oliver), a move so blatantly provocative as to make you wonder why anyone would consider Bronte a good storyteller much less a writer for the ages; and, of course, that touch turns out to be purely Fennellian, who is by her own admission more interested in making you feel icky than in trying to get you to understand her characters. By the end of this Wuthering Heights I was frankly tired of being poked and prodded with aural-visual stimuli that had no basis in reality—or Gothic unreality, for that matter. 

The sexual intercourse in Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, as in Wuthering Heights, mostly takes place off screen, but the sexual passion is more overtly effective in the overall film probably because Seligman plays it for laughs rather than stimulation, a move that earns a lot of mileage due to its New York Jewish milieu. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is a college student who eschews her family’s offers of financial support by taking “babysitting” jobs that, in fact, turn out to be sex work. That her parents and other relatives believe she can come up with the tuition for her New York City liberal arts education through babysitting is the plot’s first stumbling block but one that Seligman quickly eliminates with the most intense bum rush of Jewish jokes since Lenny Bruce first landed in the clink. 

The film comes off as a theater piece that’s been opened up for the camera, since it mostly takes place at the funeral of one of Danielle’s relatives that’s being attended by everyone she’s grown up with and quite a few she hasn’t but knows about through the grapevine. One attendant she didn’t expect to be there is Max (Danny Deferrari), her main client, so to speak, who, of course recognizes her immediately. Another thing she didn’t know is that Max is married to a beautiful shiksa, Kim (Dianna Agron), who also happens to be a successful entrepreneur and has just given birth to their first child. Complicating matters even more is the presence of Danielle’s former lover Maya (Molly Gordon), for whom she still carries a torch and who picks up on Danielle’s paranoia as soon as she spies Max walking into the not-so-somber shiva. Mix liberally with a lot of hilarious gossipy inquiries from stray relatives who, of course, wonder when Danielle will ever graduate and get married, and you’ve got a very satisfying early Philip Roth pastiche that delivers more emotional satisfaction than your usual sex comedy—or sex drama, for that matter—despite Seligman’s tendency to provide more information than necessary and overload the plot. 

The best part of Shiva Baby is Danielle’s reaction to Max’s real life, something that she shouldn’t rightly care about but does because the point of the whole movie is that she’s not mature enough to separate sex from her feelings the way a good sex worker should. It’s a conundrum that Seligman handles cleverly by not making as big a deal out of it as Danielle does.

Wuthering Heights now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Shiva Baby now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Wuthering Heights home page in Japanese

Shiva Baby home page in Japanese

Wuthering Heights photo (c) 2025 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Shiva Baby photo (c) 2020 Shiva Baby LLC