This latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s West Yorkshire drama follows Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) from childhood to adultery.

An Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) version of Wuthering Heights with Margot Robbie and a Charli XCX soundtrack sounds like it should be quite mad, possibly bad but at least camp and weird. But the only strange revelation is just how dull and perfunctory it all is, almost going through the motions as Cathy and Heathcliff have the same interaction over and over again, trapped in a series of poor choices from the aniseed-flavoured auteur.

The casting is a major flaw, not least because Robbie and Elordi have all the chemistry of freshly plucked carcasses hanging side by side. They are played by younger actors as children (Charlotte Mellington and Adolescence‘s Owen Cooper), but they change into the grown-ups while in their teens, expecting us to believe that Margot Robbie is currently going through puberty. As an adult she has little to do beyond wearing nice clothes, while Elordi’s Heathcliff has the demeanour of a puppy seeking vengeance on the family who took him to be neutered.

The only character with any Fennellian flavour is Cathy’s sister-in-law Isabella (Alison Oliver), who brings an unhinged perversion to the usually victimised role, to the point that the story should have been told from her peculiar perspective.

For all the talk of the movie’s horniness, it comes across surprisingly sanitised, and if you do go looking for kinkiness you will likely feel shortchanged by sex scenes so vanilla they should have called it Thrifty Shades of Grey. The fact Cathy and Heathcliff have sex at all appears to misunderstand the yearning inherent in the novel, but Fennell has said she wanted to recreate the misremembered version of the book she read as a child. That said, Kate Bush was only 18 when she wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’ and had only seen the BBC version, so that isn’t much of an excuse.

In any case, Fennell sees the gothic source material as a trashy romance novel, and brings that look to the pulpy production design. But combined with the barely-featured Chali XCX soundtrack, those flat aesthetics rob the film of the subversive visuals and pop songs she usually does so well. There is nothing here that even approaches the ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ or bathtub scenes from Saltburn in terms of striking moments. In fact with its twisted tale of a man taking revenge on the family who discarded him as a pet, Saltburn is the movie this should have been.

Instead we get an unusually ambivalent picture from the provocative director, and one that ultimately fails to live up to the name Emerald Fennell.