The gothic novel has always been horror wearing a corset — Wuthering Heights specifically is practically a vampire story already, with its undead obsessions, moor-fog atmosphere, and a protagonist who returns from nowhere changed into something inhuman. The question any adaptation has to answer is: what do you add? Hirani's answer is pitchforks through torsos and bubo-inflicting maladies, which is an answer, just not a particularly interesting one. The structural conceit is actually sound. Reframing Lockwood's visit as a Jonathan Harker-at-the-castle scenario maps cleanly onto Brontë's original — Lockwood was always an outsider stumbling into something he couldn't decode, and the Dracula parallel makes that explicit. The shrouded phantom of Catherine Earnshaw haunting the halls, leaving extra gore on the windowsill during her famous nocturnal apparition, should work. The weird absence of Heathcliff's son Linton, the surly servants, the creeping dread — these are the right ingredients. The problem is execution at every level below concept. Director Becca Hirani plays it straight and dour with material that desperately needs either genuine dread or knowing camp. Kate Bush and Emerald Fennell both understood that Wuthering Heights rewards theatrical excess — Bush's 1978 video and Fennell's stage work leaned into the operatic absurdity, which is exactly where the source material lives. Hirani chucks in extra stranglings and slashings and pitchfork-impalings but refuses to commit to the energy those choices demand. The casting compounds the problem. Ross Townsend-Green's Lockwood plays as if he wandered off the set of a Jeeves and Wooster adaptation — jumpy, diffident, comic in register when the film wants horror. Sky Cheema has the Rasputin looks for Heathcliff but delivers a loose, windy performance that never convinces as Byronic menace. For most of the runtime, his conversion to homicidal mania feels unmotivated, patched over in the final act by a Hellraiser-adjacent scheme involving his ward Cathy (Anna Coupé) that arrives too late to reframe what preceded it. The backstory delivery — Catherine's diary in snippets, Nelly's confidences, random supernatural flashbacks — is garbled rather than layered. There's a version of this that works: Heathcliff as 18th-century Yorkshire Ripper is a genuinely provocative concept that could generate real dread if the film committed to it. Instead, it's deployed as a late-act explanation rather than a pervading atmosphere. The film spends its runtime failing to earn the revelation it's been withholding. This is, ultimately, a film that exists because out-of-copyright IP is cheap to develop and horror is currently willing to colonize any neighbouring genre. That's not an argument against adaptation — great work gets made from worse motivations. But the cynicism shows. The grisly fate of Lockwood's horse, poor old thing, is the most memorable death in the film, which tells you something about the film's relationship with its characters. Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned is on digital platforms from 19 October.
