Wuthering Heights 2011

Andrea Arnold’s (Red Road NZIFF07) radical vision of Emily Brontë’s classic excavates the primal energies that made the original such an affront to polite society in 1847. Arnold refreshes the affront bluntly, picturing the doomed attraction of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, the ‘gypsy-dark’ foundling adopted by her father, as a tale of unrelenting tribal intolerance. Arnold’s Heathcliff is black, an escaped slave. She films the young lovers as though spying on nature’s wild children, and maintains a similar disavowal of actorly performance as we watch them mature in the film’s second half. The baleful force of the spurned Heathcliff is expressed less by the actor than by the bleak wilderness of the Yorkshire moors, brilliantly photographed in nervy, off-centre flourishes and ravishing high definition. — BG
“A rugged moor of a movie, a vast, wild place where Arnold’s vision and Emily Brontë’s meet eye to eye and claw to claw.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Movieline