Review of Wuthering Heights (2011) by Grace W — 09 Dec 2012

I love Jane Austen, I enjoyed Jane Eyre and I'm pretty sure that I will like the original book behind the movie when I get around to read it, but I hated the movie. I had really been looking forward to it but 3 minutes (literally) into the movie I had a strong sense that this would be a bad and boring movie, 5 minutes into it I though about leaving the theatre and that I had just waisted my money. The movie is extremely boring and disappointing. It doesn't have to have a lot of action, but you never really connects with the characters so you never really finds it that exciting what's going to happen to them. The movie is made in an extreme form of third person view which will leave you often frustrated that you don't know what's going on or why it's going on. Some reviews have said that it's a movie that demands something from you but this is just a bad excuse. It demands of you that you can keep your attention on your own because it's never able to grab it. The movie never really gets through to the audience, the focus on unsuccessful symbolism (something of extreme importance when in third person view) and intense focus on the showing of the "wuthering heights" without any real storyline in much of the movie together with the absence of background music just leaves you with a feel of an overly superficial movie. But even in this project does it fail. Halfway through the movie changes style and focus more on dialogue, something almost completely non existing in the first part of the movie and this does improve the movie a bit but it never outweighs it's failures. And finally, when background music finally appears in the last scene of the movie it's just weird. At least they could have followed through with their artistic project and risk failing completely instead of making a half-hearted compromise in the last five minutes of the film. Then at least I would have some respect for the artistic courage whereas now I have non. Not to mention that the music not at all fits either the general story nor the artistic form of the film. And at last, I came out of the theatre with a strong feeling of wanting to murder the cameraman. The picture often shakes and gives a bit of a nauseating feel like on a boat in strong sea but most of all, I wanted to explain to him that you doesn't have to use the zoom button in every freaking picture! The camera constantly goes so close that you can't see sufficiently of the persons or the scene and this is extremely frustrating.

I have nothing against art-films or minimalism, less is without a doubt more, but minimalism requires much better actors, instruction and cameramen than "normal" movies and none of these three things exist in the movie.

All in all, one of the worst film I have seen in theatre for a long time.