Arnold's stark Wuthering Heights a roaring success

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
ANDREA ARNOLD'S re-telling of the classic Emily Bronte novel Wuthering Heights is a radical departure from the many TV and film adaptations that have come before.
 
The story remains the same: the tale of a forbidden love between Cathy (Kaya Scodelario of Skins fame) and her social inferior Heathcliff (James Howson) that, once frustrated, has tragic consequences for all those involved.
 
But Arnold's third feature film introduces that pared down and gritty aesthetic that admirers of her previous works - Red Road and Fish Tank - have come to expect. In defiance of nearly a century of tradition, her Heathcliff is black, shifting the root of the tensions in the book from class to race.
 
WHAT THE CRITICS LIKE
This is a film "deeply entrenched in nature", writes Anthony Quinn in The Independent, from the close-ups of beetles to the raw, buffeting sound of the elements. By the end of the film, says Quinn, "I felt the urge to pick gorse off my coat, wipe the mud from my boots and warm my hands at a fire".
 
Cinematographer Robbie Ryan provides a "pagan, visceral connection to the elements" that recall Terrence Malick, writes Kate Muir in The Times. The "mesmeric power" of this approach drags the story back to its 1847 beginnings, resulting in what The Guardian’s Xan Brooks calls "primordial sludge... a beautiful rough beast of a movie".
 
This is an "astonishing" adaptation, notes Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Arnold has strayed so far from the normal conventions of period dramas that the film "feels, in the best way possible, totally alien".
 
Trade magazine Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young agrees, calling the film "an audaciously and satisfyingly stark, direct and radical approach to an oft-filmed literary classic".
 
WHAT THEY DON'T LIKE
The third and final part of the film is problematic, writes The Independent's Quinn, because Scodelario and Howson need much more help than the script provides. The minimal use of words works when Cathy and Heathcliff are kids, but in adulthood the characters resort to "brooding looks that don't summon the massive tremors of passion supposedly roiling within them".
 
A belief in the love between these two grown-up characters is vital in order for Arnold's film to properly hit home, writes Brooks in The Guardian. But "I never did, quite," he says, due to the "faint stiffness and self-consciousness of the acting and the crucial lack of chemistry".
 
Wuthering Heights is out on DVD on 26 March from Artificial Eye. Win one of three copies here. 
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