There’s a curious redundancy to the new film of “Wuthering Heights,” and not just because Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, like many literary classics, has already spawned its share of adaptations. This latest effort comes from the English director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, who previously made “Saltburn” (2023), a garish eat-the-rich satire that is best appreciated, in retrospect, as a warmup for this movie. In unleashing her camera on the fictional grounds of Saltburn, a centuries-old estate in the English countryside, Fennell was perhaps already testing out visual ideas for Thrushcross Grange, where Brontë’s heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, dooms herself to a comfortable, loveless marriage with the wealthy Edgar Linton. And, in casting Jacob Elordi as the much coveted object of desire in “Saltburn,” the director must have known that she had found her Heathcliff—a softer, more sleepy-eyed dreamboat than Laurence Olivier (in William Wyler’s adaptation) or Ralph Fiennes (in Peter Kosminsky’s), but one no less gifted at glaring magnetically into the Yorkshire wind.

The nadir of “Saltburn” was an interminably jejune sequence in which Oliver, a horndog psychopath played by Barry Keoghan, stripped down and rubbed himself against a freshly tilled grave. It was also perhaps the movie’s most morbidly Brontë-esque moment, and, settling into “Wuthering Heights,” I braced myself for a similarly debauched interpretation of the novel’s famous exhumation scene. Would Heathcliff (Elordi), digging up his late, beloved Catherine (Margot Robbie), subject her casket to desecration by dry humping? On that score, at least, the film proves uncharacteristically restrained. Elsewhere, Fennell indulges a familiar impulse to shock, or at least to jolt us awake. She deploys a heavy-breathing visual and musical style that embraces anachronism and exaggeration at every turn, and she infuses the action with a heightened sexual candor that’s meant to make past tellings of the tale look primly buttoned-up by comparison.

The film begins with a black screen and an aural Rorschach blot: are we hearing a man masturbate on a worn-out mattress? No, actually; he’s being hanged, and what we hear are his agonized groans and the steady creak of the gallows. His identity is of no consequence; among those who have gathered for his execution is a spirited young girl, Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), who lives with her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), at a craggy estate called Wuthering Heights. Catherine has pale blond hair, a love for the color red, and a habit of sprinting across the moors with wild abandon. She will soon be joined on these windy cardio workouts by a scruffy urchin named Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), whom her father brings home one day. Brontë purists will click their tongues at Fennell’s liberties: Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, is nowhere to be found, and her father, who dies early in the novel, lives to a miserable old age. The roles of father and son have effectively been merged; it is Mr. Earnshaw who will torment the young Heathcliff—and live to see the older Heathcliff bring about his undoing.

Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone, to judge by how intently the camera scrutinizes the gooey, yolky mess beneath the blankets. Fennell has a fluid fixation; she wants passion to leave a stain. This much was clear from “Saltburn,” in which Oliver laps up a man’s cummy bathwater one moment and smears his lips with a woman’s menstrual blood the next. “Wuthering Heights,” for its part, is not to be out-slurped. In one especially heated sequence, Catherine, overcome with lust, dashes off to the moors and pleasures herself ferociously against the rocks. Along comes Heathcliff, who, aroused by what he sees, lifts the little onanist up by her bodice straps and licks her fingers clean, like someone in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial.

You might chuckle, as I did, and also wonder if Fennell is courting your laughter. It’s as if, in her determination to grant these immortal characters a feral, forthright sexuality, she couldn’t help but suppress a nervous snicker. There’s a reason for this tonal confusion: underneath Fennell’s brazen streak, I think, is a certain wobbliness of conviction—a failure of nerve. The film’s advertising materials have placed the title in quote marks (perhaps I should be referring to it as “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ ”), an affectation that Fennell explained, in a recent interview, as a show of humility—an acknowledgment that her interpretation is hers alone, and couldn’t possibly capture the depths of Brontë’s masterwork. Confronted with the film itself, though, I can’t help but read the punctuation ironically, as a halfhearted signifier of mockery or camp. Is Fennell being snarky, sincere, or both? She’s blurred those boundaries before, notably in her Oscar-winning début feature, “Promising Young Woman” (2020), an archly stylized rape-revenge thriller that was, depending on whom you asked, either righteously transgressive or noxiously coy. This “Wuthering Heights” feels similarly divided against itself, and to less thematically pertinent ends.

This is hardly the first “Wuthering Heights,” good or bad, to fall short of its source material’s ambitions. Up to a point, the story unfolds as it always has: Catherine, in an ill-advised fit of pragmatism, agrees to marry Edgar (Shazad Latif), a decision that sends the rejected Heathcliff storming off into the night. He returns five years later, with a sizable fortune, the deed to Wuthering Heights, and dark-hearted motives that fall somewhere between revenge and reclamation. His ensuing scheme will ensnare Edgar’s naïve ward, Isabella (an amusing Alison Oliver), in a nightmare of a marriage, whose sadomasochistic undercurrents Fennell literalizes and carnalizes. She also shows us Catherine and Heathcliff repeatedly giving in to their desires, in the bedroom, in a horse-drawn carriage, and, most hotly and unhygienically, in the rain. (As I said: up to a point.)

Like some other adaptations—including those directed by Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold—this one steers clear of the novel’s second half, in which the torments of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance rebound, cruelly, on their descendants. Fennell has also dropped the elaborate framing devices that make Brontë’s book, among other things, a feast of unreliable narration. Everything that happens in its pages is relayed to us by Mr. Lockwood, a nosy tenant at Thrushcross Grange, or Nelly Dean, the Earnshaws’ ever-watchful housekeeper. (Fennell dispenses with Lockwood entirely; Nelly is played, with formidably chilly side-eye, by Hong Chau, but her narrator function has been excised.) The impact, on the page, is of a ghostly melodramatic hearsay: Catherine and Heathcliff, for all their vividness, can seem more like spectres than characters. They flicker in the darkness like candlelight, incandescent yet ephemeral.

Fennell, it’s safe to say, has little interest in ephemera; she wants to emblazon her Catherine and Heathcliff on our brains. To that end, she and her collaborators, including the cinematographer Linus Sandgren and the production designer Suzie Davies, paint in the broadest of strokes. They unleash a full-blown stylistic assault roughly halfway through the film, around the time that Catherine becomes mistress of Thrushcross Grange. The hallways take on the gleaming aspect of a fashion runway, and in one room the floor is such a thick, gaudy shade of red that you half expect to find the elevator from “The Shining” around the corner. A dining table overflows with jellied extravagances; I’ve never seen a film with a greater aspic ratio. As for Catherine’s bedchamber, the walls almost qualify as body horror; they match her skin tone perfectly, right down to the blue-vein marbling. If Heathcliff won’t lick them, Hannibal Lecter surely would.

I haven’t yet broached the subject of Catherine’s wardrobe, which, courtesy of the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, swells to astonishing and undeniably lovely proportions. One gown mimics the hard shimmer of latex; another looks as crackly and translucent as cellophane. (I won’t forget the cleverly matched images of Catherine dressed for her wedding and, later, a funeral; on both occasions, her veil, whipping in the wind, does nothing to obscure her sorrow.) None of this remotely fits the period, and that is surely the point: Fennell means to present Catherine and Heathcliff’s love story as something transcendent, unfolding beyond the limits of time and history. (This idea is borne out by the music, which toggles between a lush orchestral cushion of a score, by Anthony Willis, and a series of synthy, swoony ballads, by Charli XCX.) The movie seems inspired by the approach—though not the poise or finesse—of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), which deftly used its own ahistorical details to line its heroine’s gilded cage. Fennell pushes the aesthetics of entrapment even further: Catherine is given an enormous doll house, modelled on Thrushcross Grange. A shot from inside this replica, with an enormous hand manipulating the figurines within, frames her as a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” figure, navigating an otherworldly prison that can feel too vast and too small at once.

These are clever visual conceits, and Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel. Robbie and Elordi, gorgeous and gifted actors both, incarnate an Old Hollywood glamour; she can do fierce, irrepressible romanticism, and he can smolder as sensitively as the best of them. But the actors don’t connect onscreen in an emotionally revealing way, and the gargantuan excess of the production reduces them, in the end, to life-size paper dolls. (Or perhaps plastic dolls: Robbie’s frequent wardrobe changes made me feel as though I were watching a gothic “Barbie” sequel.) The actors generate sparks of passion, but no deeper air of tragic or romantic inevitability, no sense of a bond forged between souls, and only a smidgen of the corrosive rage that makes “Wuthering Heights” as much of a hate story as it is a love story.

Nevertheless, Fennell landed the megastar Catherine and Heathcliff that she clearly wanted—and, in the case of Elordi, to somewhat controversy-stirring effect. Over the years, the question of Heathcliff’s ethnicity has generated no shortage of debate; he is described in the book as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy in aspect,” “a little Lascar,” and “an American or Spanish castaway”—all terms that have been deemed ambiguous or inconclusive enough that the character has been played onscreen, almost invariably, by white actors. (A rare and worthwhile exception: Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights,” from 2012, in which Heathcliff is played by the Black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson.) Fennell has been forced to defend herself for casting a white male lead, and it struck me that her deployment of two actors of color, Chau and Latif, in key supporting roles could have been a calculated kind of insurance against criticism, a way of still laying claim to a token measure of diversity. But I was also reminded, once more, of “Saltburn,” in which a young biracial Black man, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), tries and fails to solidify his position within his aristocratic white family, which ultimately sidelines him, admonishes him, and expels him from its ranks. The intersection of race and class, and the sense of grudging familial obligation finally reaching its breaking point, proved by far that movie’s most intriguing wrinkle, and it, too, retroactively suggests a dry run for “Wuthering Heights,” if surely a richer, thornier one than this. ♦