Wuthering Heights, directed by Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights strips away all the fine clothes, romance and other trappings of period drama that often shroud Emily Bronte’s masterpiece. She reveals the wind bleached, gnarled bones of this story of violence and anger and lust – as stark as a solitary gale-tortured tree on the windswept North York Moors. 

Blood and mud dominate the film. The mud that surrounds Wuthering Heights, which Cathy skips through to meet Heathcliff and which the adult Heathcliff picks through in his fine shoes. The blood that soaks Frances Earnshaw’s legs when she gives birth to Hareton in a field. The blood of the sheep Heathcliff is slaughtering, which stains Heathcliff’s clothes as Hindley tells him never again to speak to Cathy. 

In the only truly joyful moment of the film, Cathy trips in a patch of mud and pulls Heathcliff to the ground after her. What begins with Heathcliff smearing mud on Cathy’s face – turning her, briefly, as black as he, ends far less innocently with Heathcliff straddling Cathy and a knowing look in her eyes. When Heathcliff is beaten because he would prefer to roam on the moors with Cathy than build a dry stone wall, Cathy lifts up his shirt and licks the blood from his scarred back. 

This transgressive, yet entirely natural and pure act,  performed by actors who are children, emphasises Andrea Arnold’s skill in casting two untrained, unknowing Sheffield school children, 13-year-old Shannon Beer and 14-year-old Solomon Glave, as the young Cathy and Heathcliff.  

In the same way, her controversial decision to use black Heathcliffs was not controversial at all in the context of the film. The black faces on screen were the visual counterpart of Bronte's description of him as “the little Lascar", making clear his foreignness. The racial beatings and abuse he suffered from Hindley lends this Heathcliff an almost symphathetic quality – going in some way to explain the seething rage that drives him.

James Hawson, as the second Heathcliff, was a believable extension of the first. Rather than being an oddly artificial effect, this idea of casting older actors to play the older Cathy and Heathcliff was as natural as marking the passage of time by following a shot of newly bitten, discarded apple, with the same apple – now black and rotten. 

Like Glave, Hawson was plucked from obscurity, and his identity as an outsider as well as his criminal past, feeds into a powerful, violent and moving performance. The decision to cast Kaya Scodelario, who played Effie from Skins, as the older Cathy, was less inspired. This thin and interesting looking girl seemed insipid compared to raw sexiness and innocence of the younger Cathy.

Wuthering Heights is shot entirely from Heathcliff’s point of view.  Heathcliff, riding behind Cathy on a horse over the moors has his face buried in Cathy’s streaming, sun-tinted hair. Instead of panning to show them both on the horse, the hand-held camera becomes his eyes. The screen is filled with the blowing, waving hair, interrupted only by a shot of his black hand kneading the horse’s white flank, to emphasising the effect that this closeness to Cathy is having on him.  

The most memorable lines of the book: 

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath”

are drowned by the wind and only the whisper of Cathy’s voice reaches Heathcliff as we see him tramping across the rain drenched moors. He had already left the room and Wuthering Heights, driven out by Cathy’s words: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.”

Yet nature, particularly the barren and beautiful North York Moors, is the true centre of this film. There are moments when Wuthering Heights becomes a nature documentary – its characters merely struggling animals in the landscape. The camera focuses on a bog, as if explaining the primitive life that inhabits it.  Another shot is of a lapwing circling in a sky so white it hurts the eyes, or the fuzzy golden sun playing amongst apple boughs. The only soundtrack the film has is the call of birds, the shrieks of insects, and the constant symphony of wind. 

No other adaption has placed the moors so firmly at its centre. The North York Moors are portrayed in the way that Bronte describes them, not as a place of romance and passion, but where men strive against the elements and die.