Wuthering Heights

Luis Buñuel's 1954 Mexican film carries Emily Brontë's novel into nineteenth-century Mexico. Buñuel had prepared the adaptation with his surrealist circle in the thirties and found the chance to shoot it in Mexico years later. What distinguishes it is refusing the romantic reading of the novel entirely: what Alejandro feels for Catalina is not love but obsession, and both live it as destruction. Buñuel closes with a scene in a graveyard, taking the darkest image in the book directly. The production conditions were restricted and the casting was not his choice, something he criticised himself. Who it's for: viewers interested in Buñuel and literary adaptation. Who it's not for: anyone wanting an adaptation faithful to the novel, or put off by a melodramatic register.