Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
“Strange, profane and flecked with rime and spittle. It feels, in the best way possible, totally alien. ”
10/11/2011
Read Full Review
Time Out
Dave Calhoun
“This silence and the intimate cosying-up to Heathcliff becomes a slight problem in the film’s later stages. Here, older Heathcliff and Cathy are not as interesting as their younger selves – and nor are the actors playing them. Howson looks lost and Scodelario is a thin presence.”
07/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Times
Kate Muir
“This risky adaptation will not please the popcorn audience. It demands too much time and concentration, and the second half is flawed. But for its wildly irreverent reboot of a great work of literature, and Ryan’s glorious photography, Wuthering Heights deserves your respect, gentlemen.”
11/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“In the most extraordinary way, Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer of interpretation, superimposed on a classic's frills and those of all the other remembered versions, but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book ... That is an illusion, of course, but a convincing and thrilling one.”
10/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“You can tell from the first minutes that this wants to honour the wildness of Brontë's vision; by the end you admire the way it tries to honour the mystery. What has happened between the story's young couple seems less a romance than a negative of a romance, where love has been transfigured into something masochistic, thwarted, and brutal.”
11/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
“[The film] deserves a lot of credit for approaching sacred source material in such a radical form. Refusing to conform to the stately conventions of British period drama ... Arnold deconstructs Emily Brontë’s classic story of thwarted, forbidden love...”
11/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Observer
Philip French
“The movie is at its strongest in [the] early scenes as Cathy and Heathcliff form a childhood bond against the bitter world and become one with each other in the natural world ... This is helped by the excellent naturalistic handheld camerawork of Arnold's regular cameraman, Robbie Ryan, and a remarkable soundtrack designed by Nicolas Becker.
”
13/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“[A] raw, rude and realistic adaptation.
”
13/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“Arnold ... has every right to perform a “literectomy”: filleting a novel of the unfilmable, going for the feral through the photogenic. But in this movie there is too much photogenic, too little feral and, sadly, no Heathcliff worthy of the name. ”
10/11/2011
Read Full Review
Empire Magazine
Helen O'Hara
“Andrea Arnold, nothing if not committed to realism in low-key ... goes back to the novel and places the emphasis firmly on the strangeness of Emily Brontë’s story, emphasising not its oft-claimed love story but the strange nature of the bond between Heathcliff and Cathy.”
07/11/2011
Read Full Review
The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“Get the weather and the landscape right in Wuthering Heights and you are practically home and dry. Or wet. Lash goes the rain. Crash goes the barn door. Howl goes the wind, moaning and mithering like a god with toothache. Perhaps the wind is complaining that the film is only half an adaptation, not a Brontësaurus but a Brontë sawn in two.
”
14/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“Fortunately, Arnold's Wuthering Heights is not principally driven by the acting but by its style of filming. It's all deliberately rough. The soundtrack is full of wind and rain, heard blowing hard against the microphone. ”
11/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“A would-be sophisticated but actually naive attempt to turn Emily Bronte’s fascinating, emotionally involving romantic melodrama into the most alienating kind of brutalism. ”
11/11/2011
Read Full Review