Shay

I’ve added another alien to my collection of beautiful baby sons, welcome Rocky.

I watched this the way God intended, McPlant in one had, Capybara plushie in the other.

May this type of love never find me. I don’t think this movie is half as bad as the internet told me it would be. It’s certainly not an adaptation of *Wuthering Heights* (I’d argue it’s as much an adaptation of its namesake as *Saltburn* was an adaptation of *The Talented Mr Ripley*), and feels more like stepping into someone else’s dream of a period drama.  That said, it’s not unwatchable. It’s visually stunning. Neither Cathy nor Heathcliff are decent human beings, nor does it ever feel like they truly do love each other once they are played by Elordie and Robbie. I feel like they represent those unbearable types who consider negging to be foreplay, and lust to be love. There’s a scene I can only describe as the ultimate form of cucking, in which Cathy talks about how much she loves and fucks her husband while Heathcliff fucks her, which is… rather odd to watch. Her husband, Edgar, is an entirely sympathetic and faultless character (even telling Heathcliff not to see Cathy’s dead body, not out of hatred for him, but because he thinks it will be too much for Heathcliff to bear) which only amplifies how terrible Cathy and Heathcliff’s entire affair is.  There is also a cute Pomeranian in this, who does *not *die, so Elordie’s Heathcliff is lower on my shit list than the OG at least.

Truthfully I can’t be entirely unbiased about this, obviously Mark makes a decent amount of the content I consume, so I was always going to be into this. I didn’t, however, expect to be *THIS *into it. Immediately, this isn’t for everyone. It’s not meant to be for everyone, it’s experimental, it’s slow, it’s *weird*. It asks the audience to answer a lot of the questions it poses for themselves, and a lot of people aren’t comfortable in that unknown space. I never played the game and was unfamiliar with its storyline and chose to stay that way to experience the film blind, and I didn’t expect it to be as lovecraftian as it was, which was a fun surprise.  The film feels claustrophobic, and that’s achieved in more than just its limited setting (and the claustrophobia of it would be significantly lessened if the film bro sat beside me had his way and ‘expanded’ it). You become so used to seeing these repeated close ups of Mark and of the machinery around him that by the end of the film you feel as if you’ve memorised the exact layout of the sub itself - you’ve been there for 2 hours, Simon has been there for days, how do you think he feels?  That said, the film isn’t without its faults. I felt like the flashback took me out of the claustrophobic setting Mark worked so hard to curate throughout the rest of the film. I do also think that it could have been slightly shorter - generally this is how I always feel when directors edit their own work, it’s better to have an editor with a tad more objectivity.  But the positives of this massively outweigh the negatives, and it’s an incredible feat that Mark was able to create this from the ground up and people across the world were able to see this in *THEATRES*. That’s a feat most of the film students I studied with will never achieve, myself included. Massive props.