There is something strange about comparing the latest Wuthering Heights adaptation by director Emerald Fennell to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. One is windswept moors, erotic chaos, and operatic suffering. The other confines us to a single apartment, where suspicion builds from across a courtyard.
Yet placed side by side, both films reveal something about modern filmmaking: we now have more freedom than ever, freedom to show anything, to depict anything, to stage sexuality and spectacle without restraint. The question is whether that freedom makes for better cinema, or whether the absence of limits ultimately weakens it.
Rear Window, adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, is a masterclass in withheld information. The suspected murder of a wife happens offscreen. We see fragments. A domineering husband. A frightened woman. A scream in the night. A trunk. The horror is assembled in our minds.
Hitchcock does not show violence. He makes us complicit in inventing it.
The result is tension born from absence. The film trusts the viewer’s imagination.
Now consider the newest adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Fennell, known for directing Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, films with bold visual framing and provocative sexual themes. In this film, sexuality is visual pageantry. Bodies are aestheticized. Desire is splashed vulgarly across the screen rather than discovered.
Where Rear Window withholds, Wuthering Heights reveals. Everything.
One of the film’s most revealing sequences directly centers on voyeurism. Catherine (Margot Robbie) stands above and looks down upon two figures engaged in a bondage encounter. Wrists are tied. Bodies strain and arch beneath tension. The choreography is explicit. The camera does not cut away. It lingers on flesh, on restraint, on the mechanics of domination. Nothing is obscured. The transgression is completely visible.
There is no waiting.
No escalation.
No slow tightening of tension.
Mystery is the most erotic force in storytelling. When everything is shown, desire has nowhere to rise. When intensity is immediate and constant, it flattens instead of crescendos.
The difference is not moral but structural. Restraint builds anticipation. Overexposure collapses it.
Eroticism thrives on distance. On the charged space between two people who have not yet touched. In Rear Window, Grace Kelly is introduced as perfection. Sculptural. Immaculate. Almost unreal. But Hitchcock complicates her. Her beauty becomes something more than surface. Through restraint, her desirability deepens. When she finally moves toward danger, that risk gives her sexuality dimension. She becomes more compelling not because the film shows more, but because it withholds.
In the new Wuthering Heights, Catherine is framed as raw and wild, yet still styled, polished, corseted, and visually eroticized from the very first frame. Her bosom heaves. Her face is immaculate. The camera insists on brazen sexuality.
The paradox is striking: we are told she is untamed, yet she is so meticulously curated that the result feels sterile rather than sensual.
True wildness and sexuality are interior. In Brontë’s novel, Catherine’s ferocity is psychological first. It is repression and longing that make her combustible. Her sexuality simmers beneath social constraint and the reader gets to come along on that journey of character development. This is where the film version of Wuthering Heights fails.
The same contrast exists between the leading men.
James Stewart in Rear Window is vulnerable. Immobilized. Complicated. The erotic tension between him and Kelly builds. There is friction. There is progression.
Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff arrives already sculpted. Tall. Muscular. Visually dangerous. The intensity is telegraphed. There is no gradual warming into complexity, only immediate voltage.
The actors are not at fault. The aesthetic choices are.
Rear Window uses saturated Technicolor, theatrical framing, and bold composition, yet the emotional architecture is controlled. The film builds character through withholding. The audience leans forward.
Wuthering Heights uses heightened color, graphic sensuality and bold visual language, and in that sense it is artistically ambitious. It is not timid filmmaking. But it reveals too much, too quickly. There is little mystery. Little discovery. Little invitation for the audience to invest in the film. We are not asked to imagine. We are asked to lazily consume; there is no real effort, so there is no real investment on the viewer’s part.
That difference matters.
Restraint is not prudishness. It assumes the audience has interiority. It allows room for interpretation, anticipation, and projection. When everything is shown, nothing is discovered.
Mystery is more erotic than exposure. Suggestion is more powerful than spectacle. And perhaps what feels lost in contemporary filmmaking, like Wuthering Heights, is not beauty or ambition, but the invitation to participate.
Rear Window makes us active. It forces us to assemble the crime and the relationship between Lisa and Jeff, to question what we see, to lean forward and complete the story.
When films stop leaving space for the audience, they don’t become more daring. They just become less involved.
Rear Window seduces its audience.
Wuthering Heights leaves something to be desired.
If you want to experience true cinematic seduction, skip the moors and revisit Hitchcock. That’s where anticipation still smolders and where tension, not gratuitous excess, delivers a REEL thrill.
Amy Pais-Richer is REEL 360 News’ newest contributor. She is a published author and we are lucky to have her!
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