EMerald Fennell lights up the campground as he reinvents Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff story, set in the windswept Yorkshire moors, as a 20-page fashion shoot of unrelenting silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and cheeky BDSM slaps. At one stage, Margot Robbie’s Cathy heads off into the wilderness for some secret self-pleasure, but unfortunately we don’t get the bold scene where Jacob Elordi’s thirsty Heathcliff does the same thing in the stable while gruffly muttering in that Yelkeshire accent.

So this is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or more accurately Wuthering Heights. The title is presented proudly in inverted commas, but the postmodern irony seems pointless. Cathy is a trembling, wiry belle in Heathcliff’s presence, a moody, long-haired, bearded outsider to Heathcliff himself, like Scarlett O’Hara trying to melt into the arms of Charles Manson. However, he later becomes significantly darsified, rocking a shorter, more glamorous hairstyle, and a spirea-thin shirt that never dries.

Young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) is quite the love interest, indulging as a child in the company of her old, sparkling-eyed father, a role played by Martin Clunes for the entire film. Fennell coincidentally removed the character of Cathy’s older brother Hindley from the book (along with his wife and son) and reassigned Hindley’s destructive drinking and gambling to their father. Fennell also loses the second half of The Next Generation, a novel about the grown children of Cathy, Hindley, and Heathcliff, as per traditional WH adaptations. She also very weakly erases Heathcliff’s dark skin problem. And perhaps those inverted commas are meant to ignore the “reliability” issue.

Mr. Earnshaw, on an exaggerated whim, rescues a young mean-spirited lad from the streets of Liverpool on the job and adopts him as Cathy’s stepbrother. Of course, this is Heathcliff, played by Owen Cooper (the young star of Netflix’s award-winning drama Adolescence) as a boy in distress. They ran wild together as children, but as adults of the near-Aristocrat and servant class, respectively, they seem unable to consummate their feelings for each other, or even to acknowledge them.

The family’s fate is dire, Cathy marries her wealthy milquetoast neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and Heathcliff’s heart is thus broken and Heathcliff storms off. He returns years later, wealthy, and has a passionate relationship with Kathy, who learns the truth about why he left. Fennell spitefully ends up marrying Edgar’s nagging sister Isabella (played by Alison Oliver, amusingly channeling Sophie Thompson), but downplays her cruelty to her by casting Isabella as a grinning, consenting supporting character.

As for Nelly Dean, the omniscient housekeeper played by Hong Chau, she is the trickiest character in the book, one whose eyes almost every action is seen. Nelly is the uncrowned queen of English literature of unreliable narrators, the deadpan witness and instigator of the central disastrous misunderstanding that destroys Heathcliff and Cathy’s happiness. Interestingly, Fennell has Cassie confront Nellie on this point. Of course, at some stage things get real and a tsunami of tears washes over me. It’s all in a frenetic, exhausting Baz Luhrmann-esque style, and the film begins to look like a 136-minute video for the Charli XCX song on the soundtrack.

Wuthering Heights doesn’t have the live-action impact of Fennell’s earlier films Saltburn or Promising Young Woman , nor indeed does Andrea Arnold’s flawed and wonderful primitivist take on Brontë’s 2011 novel, which believed in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. For Fennell, it seems like an extravagant pose of disingenuous abandon. It’s a pseudo-erotic, pseudo-romantic, and conversely sad, pseudo-emotional club night.