Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights reimagines Emily Brontë’s classic novel as a big-budget bodice ripper. It stars Jacob Elordi as the lascivious, brutish Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as an improbably blonde, manifestly too-old Cathy Earnshaw. Among other attractions, it features public hanging, dollhouse murder, puppy play, and vast quantities of tactile goop as a stand-in for the unspeakable. There are enough overtones of horny menace to pass for “erotic” among a viewing public in the midst of a sex drought. The film is both overlong and overwrought and is neither as brilliant nor as terrible as critics and Letterboxd reviewers make it out to be. It has to be one of the most middling movies to stoke a media super-cycle, which has had the unfortunate effect of overshadowing the best thing it has going for it: a new companion album by Charli XCX.
After dominating culture so thoroughly that she left lasting marks on both color theory and American presidential politics, Wuthering Heights serves as a hard reset and a clever lateral move for the British pop diva in the wake of BRAT. In what is either a fluke of good timing or a 5D command of the narrative, it is now possible to go to your local movie theater and make a double feature of Charli’s recent career. The anxieties underlying her metafictional turn in the sorta-documentary The Moment—that the gears of commerce would either crush her as an artist or leave her in the dust—have proven to be unfounded. Here she is once again at the center of pop culture, working at the peak of her abilities to renovate her sound for the largest audience possible. By trading strobe-lit arenas for wild and windy moors, the singer meets the challenge of transplanting her music into a new landscape. Wuthering Heights is both a reinvention and familiar offering from the singer: underlining her adventurousness as a musician and the strengths (and limits) of her songwriting.
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After Fennell approached her to write a song for the film, Charli and producer Finn Keane threw themselves into the project, expanding the assignment into a full soundtrack. Like Fennell’s film, Wuthering Heights doesn’t adapt Brontë’s book for its plot but for its vibe. The record is vivid and fragmentary, and it revolves around a clutch of loaded, broadly sketched themes: attraction so powerful it feels like a curse, devotion so total it brings you to your knees, absence so painful it cuts to the bone. The John Cale-featuring “House” sets an appropriately vague and foreboding tone. With a voice as ancient and craggy as the hills, Cale’s spoken-word narration poses unanswerable questions about beauty and eternity before death creeps into the picture and Charli joins him in shriek-intoning the line, “I think I’m gonna die in this house.”
Even for a singer who has made a home on top of the thorniest of club beats, the full-bodied cello blasts on “House” represent another magnitude of chaos. Inspired by Cale’s stated wish to sound “elegant and brutal” in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground documentary, Charli and Keane adopted this slogan as the record’s guiding mission. The string arrangements are lovely, lending every song a measure of uplift and writhing texture. But the record’s best tracks trend brutal, when the physicality of the music barrels down hardest. With its mournful swell and industrial churn, “Funny Mouth” sounds far more like a lost Vulnicura cut than anything on BRAT. Here the strings underline the lyric’s unspoken threat and give a spiky subtext to the silky vocals. The beatless “Wall of Sound” is a liebespaar between Charli’s cartwheeling melody and a groaning expanse of strings: Struggling against the pull of the arrangement, she finally gives into her desire and allows her voice to get carried up and away with the sound.
