Critics reviews

Using Bronte's description of Heathcliff as "dark-skinned" as a launching point, Arnold casts two black actors as the older and younger versions of him, which gives the class-divided romance a provocatively visual character (both performers are excellent at conveying an internalized anger that comes from systematic social marginalization). At the same time, the film comes to rely on race as an automatic dramatic device, a signifier of otherness that swallows up all other concerns.

As [Heathcliff] grows into adulthood, his love for the daughter, Catherine, becomes a boldly romanticized exploration of physical desire in the face of extreme oppression. In a key scene, as Heathcliff's back drips with blood after a lashing, Catherine dutifully licks him clean.

Arnold, a director of uncommon originality, attacks our very notion of what a costume drama should look like. The result is neither dainty nor remotely refined: It's an animalistic, mud-splattered howl of torment.

The wild otherness of the young Heathcliff derives largely from Glave's nearly mute performance; when words form in his mouth they are not so much said as spat. Howson's torrents of speech, though they reveal more of the hero's anguish, have the adverse effect of making him less Byronic than melodramatic.

The material is directed with a strategy and, for its first hour at least, when Heathcliff and Cathy are still children, Arnold's movie is conceptually quite brilliant — a total statement in its rough and tumble visuals.

Out of this beautifully rendered mood comes Brontë's classic tale of long-thwarted romance, and if Arnold does nothing else, she clarifies the nature of that lasting love, one that emerges out of an ache but also a need to be warm, to gather around a glow.

The virtuous anti-intellectualism of the movie's first half terminally sags the second, primarily because Arnold doesn't allow Cathy to express the painful bifurcation of her adult affections with Brontë's shocking eloquence. (When Edgar demands that she choose between himself and Heathcliff, she whimpers pitifully.)

Of the Heathcliffs, the 14-year-old Glave, though literally sidelined much of the time, listening at doors which are locked to him, is the one to be believed. When Howson returns to revenge his abuse and Cathy's final spurning, the moors cease to be a world; the single-minded passion—which is to say, obsession—of children is needed to animate the thing.

From the immediate present to the 19th century, or is it? That's the trouble with Andrea Arnold's allegedly radical rethinking of Emily Brontë's classic WUTHERING HEIGHTS, which tends to strip away poetic language in favor of close-up, texture, and the windswept heather along those infamous moors.

The provocative casting of Heathcliff as a black child is a minor twist next to the true marvels of Arnold's revision: dialogue is radically reduced, making ample room to surround the viewer in an ecstatic sensory experience of the Yorkshire moorlands.

Designed to hack away at the ornamental crust created by years of genteel literary adaptations, it's a visually forceful attempt at seizing the ardor of the novel that nevertheless pales next to the abyss of passion explored by Luis Buñuel in his own strange, 1954 visualization of Brontë's classic.

As in Fish Tank, Arnold favours show-offy compositions and overt symbolism—a chained white horse there, a snared hare here—without demonstrating much ability to plausibly pace and escalate dramatic action. Nor much in the way of taste: yes, that is a Mumford and Sons song on the end credits.