The glass-shattering Kate Bush song is reimagined as a class-shattering film in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

Bleak even by Brontë standards, this earthy, elemental retelling of the gothic drama caused a stir upon its release with its muddy milieu and novel-accurate casting of black actors (Solomon Glave then James Howson) as Heathcliff for the first time. The film is boldly told from his perspective, so most of the drama is glimpsed through cracks in doors and shards of light, the characters trapped by a tight aspect ratio and intimate handheld camerawork.

We meet Heathcliff and Cathy (Shannon Beer) as children who bond over animal carcasses, in what actually prove to be the film’s lighter moments. The only funny thing about this movie is that it is on Disney+, and while it does feature squirrels, sheep, dogs and rabbits, they don’t exactly live happily ever after. There probably aren’t many movies on Disney+ in which someone fucks a corpse, although it is the sort of thing you could imagine happening in Love Actually. In any case this is potentially the only element shared by Emerald Fennell’s upcoming version.

Arnold brings the book’s themes of the primal and prejudice to the surface, her concern over abuse and animal cruelty encapsulated by a scene in which Cathy licks Heathcliff’s wounds after he has been whipped. She also provides a rugged British realism, with sparse and sweary Yorkshire dialogue that sounds like a Sally Wainwright script. But the storytelling is primarily visual, visceral and violent, making it much more interesting and antagonistic than your usual costume drama.

Where the film falls down is in its second half, when we rejoin Cathy and Heathcliff as adults, and their chemistry goes out the window made famous by Kate Bush. Kaya Scodelario (Effy from Skins) is miscast as the grown-up Cathy, since she looks less like the girl we just saw rolling around in mud and more like Effy from Skins.

Her newfound aloofness is presumably deliberate, highlighting the social distance her marriage to the wealthy Edgar (James Northcote) has put between her and Heathcliff, but Scodelario’s performance lacks the grit to suggest much continuity in the character. The movie shifts into more conventional costume drama territory (necrophilia notwithstanding), and your sympathies are severely tested.

Arnold later expressed her dissatisfaction with the movie, and it is undoubtedly a difficult piece of work. But there is much to admire in this bitter, bracing and brutal picture that will make dogs cower as much if not more than the Kate Bush version.