Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s tale of intoxicatingly untamed, yet ultimately impossible love, is one of the most often told of love stories – from the classic cinematic imagining starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, to Kate Bush’s howling musical rendition, (who could forget that vermillion gown and frantic choreography) – Wuthering Heights continues to float about the popular consciousness, and even more remarkably for characters so distinguished by their un-likeability; it is a story that continues to crawl under the skin and elicit a powerful response.

Oscar-winning British filmmaker Andrea Arnold is next up to offer her interpretation, a film that was always sure to be anything but the typically stuffy, period drama. Belonging to a generation of British filmmakers, alongside Lynne Ramsay and Steve McQueen, deeply invested in a bold, artistic sensibility – Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a fresh, uncompromisingly visceral rendition. Refusing to rely on the book’s literary distinction as it’s power, dialogue is seldom exchanged throughout, the film running near wordless – Arnold instead chooses to emphasize sensation; the scarcity of dialogue accentuating the silence, the heavy breathlessness and whisperings and those raw currents of feeling the story has long been associated with.