Slick, sultry, and superficial. All accurate descriptors of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. But as the scare quotes underpinning this take on Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel suggest, it’s less of an adaptation and more of a loose interpretation of its lingering, haunting impact on our cultural zeitgeist. Though its unfettered gutting of key characters, plot points, and nuances occasionally render it terribly hollow and unsubtle, such seemingly negative qualities manifest as strengths in a scattershot film that boldly ensnares and titillates our senses.

For how unfaithful and thematically detached it remains from its source text, it nonetheless manages to evoke its sweeping feel, and in key moments, its deeply felt spirit. An anti-adaptation that misses the forest for the trees yet paints its limited canvas with such ardour and passion that it becomes hard to deny its enveloping vision.

Opening with sexually suggestive painting that gives way to a jarringly morbid sight, Fennell’s film shows its hand immediately, using the classic tale as more of a springboard to semi-successfully interrogate the precarious line between pain and pleasure, submission and domination. It’s a quality defined by the shifting power dynamics between a young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) and her pet, Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), a street urchin adopted by her gambling addict father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes).

As the two adolescents come of age, they grow into ardent friends, but a significant divide persists. Cathy (now played by Margot Robbie), bewitched by the comforts and luxury offered by a marriage to the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), relinquishes her budding kinky romance with the dashingly sullen, but indigent Heathcliff (now played by Jacob Elordi). When Heathcliff returns five years after Cathy’s demure marriage to Linton, now a man of wealth, her rekindled desire proves little match for his lust for revenge.

Unfolding as a CliffsNotes version that literary devotees will surely disregard, especially as its character dynamics and interplay are more suggested than carefully captured, “Wuthering Heights” flourishes as an entirely different kind of exercise.

Brontë’s textured characterization and layered lyricism are undone by a pastel world of tactile eroticism—full of runny eggs, clitoral snail trails, and fingered fish gelatine that collide with lush blood-red floors and veiny epidermal wallpaper. While such perverse beauty infiltrates each frame, Fennell’s film remains an ethereal, enveloping fairytale. A panoply of kaleidoscopic sights and sounds, only heightened by Robbie and Elordi’s highly theatrical performances, which thrillingly border on caricature.

Its sheer disregard for its source material gives way to an experience that’s undeniably cathartic in its comedic and sexual release. While Fennell’s film could have shamelessly indulged in its worst tendencies a tad more, as it pulls punches in its more traditionally inclined closing act, it threatens to make us as lovesick as its bruised protagonists and the tortured synths pervading Charli XCX’s soundtrack. Sure, it butchers Brontë, but it’s too much fun watching it play with the blood.

“Wuthering Heights” releases Feb 13.