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.
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.
Part of the reason that Charli’s voice fits so neatly in what ought to be a radically new context is that her hooks always dominate the instrumentals. Despite inevitable comparisons to Rosalía’s Lux, Wuthering Heights is first and foremost a pop record in classical drag, rather than any kind of compositional hybrid. This means that the vivid surroundings can be undercut when a song guns for more a conventional payoff. On “Out of Myself” and “My Reminder,” the strings flesh out the familiar elements of fairly standard synth pop; the novelty of their sound can’t overcome the flatness of their ideas. By contrast some of the best songs harken back to earlier eras of Charli’s discography. “Chains of Love” builds and booms in a way that’s scarcely been heard since True Romance. The sudden leap that “Eyes of the World” takes is surprising no matter how many times you brace for it. Charli proved she had a rare chemistry with Sky Ferreira on “Cross You Out,” and the interplay of their soaring voices makes you wish they would lock in for an album of duets.
As a songwriter, Charli’s directness, rather than her expressiveness, has long been her greatest gift; although a diva as a performer, as a writer she’s still acquiring a taste for the dramatic. “Always Everywhere” works from the simple premise of being constantly reminded of a loved one’s face, but it is studded with lapidary-fine detail that elevates it above romantic cliché. “On the water, your face on top of mine/A fever dream of mirrored features, hungry eyes,” she sings over barely perceptible strings. Plenty of songs, though, bank on the latent heaviness of goth imagery to charge up a scene. This is the case on “Dying for You” and “Out of Myself,” which evoke pain, torture, and twisted desire while being too agreeably pop to truly honor the gnarliness of the material.
Pop songs operate on a smaller scale than two-hour movies, and, despite those constraints, the liberties that Charli and Keane take in blending pop hooks and orchestral chaos gives their soundtrack album an impressive vastness. Still, the duo can occasionally repeat the same shortcomings of the film. In context, “Chains of Love” accompanies a sequence similar to the shopping spree from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Having accepted Edgar Linton’s offer to join hands (and bank accounts), Cathy enjoys the creature comforts of her new life with a heavy heart that still longs for Heathcliff’s rough embrace. But Fennell is too fixated on the surface dazzle to undercut the mood with deeper melancholy or conflicted sexuality. Wuthering Heights is a period drama with iPhone face, one that can recognize fraught emotion but can’t always inhabit it. Charli is one of the definitive pop artists of our time, but in soundtracking a classic story, she never fully transcends our moment.
