The new Wuthering Heights is technically a literary adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 gothic romance about class and society, but it plays more like the hot-and-heavy fever dream of an avid reader of lusty contemporary romance fiction. It's not a story so much as a series of storm-like adolescent moods that our heroine, young Catherine, is weathering. Her father is a sad old drunk, a once-noble man whose health and fortunes have declined. His vitality is faded and shriveled; in every way, he's withering. His decline has manifested in the craggy and desolate estate at which he, his daughter, and a moody but smoldering young man named Heathcliff reside; it's named after local rocky heights that are windy and raging, which is to say they are, well, wuthering.
If nothing else, we finally have a movie that will help viewers understand the difference between withering, weathering, and wuthering.
