‘Wuthering Heights’ review: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are so hot, they self-combust

Teachers won’t be playing this movie in English Lit class anytime soon.

Not unless their kink is angry emails.

For one, Emerald Fennell’s R-rated “Wuthering Heights” has a healthy amount of sex scenes — far more, anyway, than the novel’s zero.

And that’s not the only bold departure from the Victorian-Era source material.

If high-school students were to watch the film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi to study for final exams, they’d have to repeat sophomore year. Fennell’s telling deviates from Emily Brontë’s 1847 book with abandon.

Plotlines get changed or chopped, the cast of characters has been streamlined to less than 10, the costumes are as period-accurate to the nineteenth century as a Honda Accord and there is a song by Charli XCX.

You know what? That’s great. Have at it. “Wuthering Heights” is 179 years old and much too complicated a story — both psychologically and structurally — to faithfully adapt onscreen into anything resembling a good time.

And, as far as pairing a literary classic with this director’s idiosyncratic style, nobody goes to a movie by Fennell, the devilish mind behind “Saltburn” and “Promising Young Woman,” for a stuffy BBC miniseries from the late ‘80s.

This is a sexy, funny, ravishing and dark revision that keeps Heathcliff’s frightening obsessiveness, emotional toxicity and sadism intact while ably contorting the tale into a decadent, modern, yet still distinctly gothic, romance.

And much more so than in her previous two movies, which were clever puzzles, Fennell makes the viewer care about her star-crossed leads, a lot actually, even when the duo behave like monsters.

They first meet as children, when a quiet orphan boy is taken in by the owner (Martin Clunes) of a chilly estate in north of England — Wuthering Heights. The man’s daughter, bossy, chatty Cathy (Charlotte Mellington), names her shy new plaything Heathcliff, after her dead brother.

By happenstance, Fennell cast 16-year-old Owen Cooper, the breakout star of Netflix’s “Adolescence,” as the young buck before his TV show exploded and he replaced his soccer trophies with an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Cooper proves himself a rising star once again, as every word is spoken with the conviction and passion of an actor far beyond his years.

When he so intensely tells Mellington’s Cathy, “I will never go away. I will never leave you. No matter what you do,” it’s chilling as the misty moors of Yorkshire.

In adulthood, the two are inseparable but tempestuous. Cathy (Robbie) is unmarried and has a tomboy streak. Wearing a long dress, she casually trots right through the blood of a recently butchered pig. And Elordi’s long-haired, scruffy Heathcliff is so dirty you can smell him through the screen.

He’s also unpleasant to be around — “rough, wild and wicked temper,” as Cathy puts it. Yet his norms-be-damned rogueness only feeds her infatuation.

When, manipulated by downcast housekeeper Nelly (Hong Chau), Cathy decides to wed a wealthy, kindhearted neighbor named Edgar, Heathcliff flees in a fury for five years, only to return rich, spiffed-up and ready to torment her some more.

For anybody worried that Elordi and Robbie wouldn’t spark, well, they positively self–combust. When newly madeover Heathcliff came back to Wuthering Heights through a cloud of dense fog, the woman next to me gasped like she’d just received a marriage proposal.

Heathcliff and Cathy brood and fight and whine and drag everybody else through mud. And by some miracle we still like them. 

That’s because both Robbie and Elordi find unexpected charm in all the cruel manipulation and borderline barbarity. When Scary Met Nasty.

The most recognizably Fennelly touches are in Edgar Linton’s luxe manse, the color-popping opposite of dank and dreary Wuthering Heights. There are long halls with sultry red floors, a fireplace of plaster hands and a topiary garden out of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Bright as his home is Shazad Latif’s sweet and vanilla Edgar. He’s perfect, but the safe choice. So Cathy’s mean disregard for her husband as Heathcliff thrusts himself back into her life is both horrific and gets the go-ahead from the audience.

And humor is introduced by the superb Alison Oliver as Edgar’s weird ward Isabella. Her creepy, nosy doll collector with a giggly crush on Heathcliff is a scream.

However, as Fennell does so well, the comedy is misdirection. Soon enough, the movie turns disturbing and ultimately heartbreaking.

Traditionalists will moan that Fennell has turned Brontë’s book into a sweeping romance. And, yes, she has. Music swells, tears flow, faces are perfect.

But what makes the movie so enthralling is that she hits on a powerful tug-of-war: We root hard for Heathcliff and Cathy, even though we know full well we shouldn’t.