THE CHARLI MOVIE (Wuthering Heights)

A bitter friend thinks I’ll push it til the day I die. Fucking trip on my own noose mid-sentence and leave everyone hanging. Make myself all done up in miseries and impossible desires like I’m already at the end. Probably say something forgettable going down like ‘Are you happy now?’ or ‘Look what you did.’ The thing about getting the last laugh is that by the time you get there, no one even thinks it’s funny anymore. But maybe the phrase on my lips is ‘I still got there first.’

I go see this movie last-minute with my friend on Valentine’s Day. I’m fresh off a break-up—or maybe two—from last month, but none of it really comes up when we get there. Really, my friend’s off buying popcorn from an automated machine and I’m testing all the slushy flavors from a water cup. It’s only cuz their sister mentioned it in the car that we said why not and drove to the mall. The big draw to me is Charli xcx. All I know about it is that she did the music. My eyes suck but I don’t even bring my glasses in. All I really want to do at this movie is hear it.

Oh my fucking god it took at least like three entire hours for me and Lincoln to get normal after seeing this needed to just sit in the car and let it run for like an hour or two before we could even move like what could we possibly even say after that there was just no way to begin kind of speechless in the most harrowing way somehow a thing we didn’t even think possible came flooding right before our eyes undeniable thank god we got the last two seats together cuz I needed to clutch onto his hand so bad that last act holding me madly for dear life thinking to myself there’s no way this can be the movie like there’s no actual way this is it but actually it was and actually we could not find the words and actually the whole viewing experience including driving like 30 miles away at breakneck speed nearly reenacting the titanic from all this ice on the road trying to find a way to order fries and being presented with a menu placard where you could read all about a ‘bumpin’ that 365 churro popcorn’ or order a ‘club classics’ which was actually just a chicken sandwich kind of drove the both of us insane in a way neither of us were clairvoyant enough to brutally anticipate and ended with Lincoln declaring he would never come to this theatre again meaning the point is we kept sitting after we got to his house and it was probably already 3 now with me having work at like 8 so I had to go soon or probably should have already went and we were both pretty much all good again having recovered mostly from seeing something we would rather have forgotten until some nonessential phrasing or detail or remark brought us all the way back to those two recliner seats and we had to do the self renewal process all over again except much faster this time because, like I’m telling you, I really had to go

Lincoln hates period pieces but I’m sick of him not knowing what I’m talking about so I’m telling—nearly yelling—to him straight on the phone about how it’s his choice if he wants to see it or not and how I really wanna see it with him but really it’s his choice and how I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to and how I want to talk with him about it but how I can’t really answer any of his questions about what I’m saying unless he also sees it too and on and on and on until I get sick of whatever I’m saying and we both have to get off the phone. He watches the trailer that night and meets me at the cinema the next day. We walk straight in and don’t say a word to each other the whole time. When I ask him if he got what I meant after, he says no.

THE ALBUM IS NOT THE ALBUM. And also it’s not even really that good. I mean, ok, yeah, it’s bad. It’s like kinda bad. But that doesn’t even matter because THE MOVIE IS THE ALBUM. The movie is one long Charli xcx SONG or ALBUM or MUSIC VIDEO or PERFORMANCE. Going to see this movie is basically like going to see her in concert. What I wanted from The Moment was one thing condense all of Charli into a single cultural object and what I got was hung over on no sleep the next day. But this? WUTHERING HEIGHTS DID WHAT THE MOMENT COULD NOT. Not the book, not the album, not the press tour, the MOVIE. WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS THE CHARLI xcx MOVIE. It’s pretty much everything that she’s all about. She didn’t write it, but maybe that makes it even better. She just got butt-dialed by Emerald Fennell and sent the script on WhatsApp and asked ‘What do you feel?’ and the answer it seems, was a lot. AND THANK GOD IT WAS A LOT. AND IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A LOT. CHARLI XCX WOULDN’T BE CHARLI XCX IF SHE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ANYTHING SHE FELT, IF THE THING SHE FELT DIDN’T BITE AND TUG AND PULL AT HER IN SOME BORDERLINE TORMENTING WAY. CHARLI XCX IS NOT A PERSON, SHE IS A PERSONA, AND WHAT THIS PERSONA IS, IS EXACTLY WHAT WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS. AND THAT’S WHY YOU NEEDED TO SEE THIS MOVIE, AND THAT’S WHY I NEEDED TO SEE THIS MOVIE WITH YOU, AND THAT’S WHY I KEEP GOING BACK TO WATCH IT, BECAUSE YEAH, ON THE SCREEN IS MARGOT ROBBIE AND JACOB ELORDI AND THESE SWEEPING SHOTS AND THESE GORGEOUS GOWNS AND ALL THAT FXCKING PERIOD SHIT THAT YOU HATE, BUT REALLY ALL I’M SEEING AND HEARING AND FEELING IS CHARLI. THE WHOLE THING TO ME IS JUST CHARLI. I’m getting loud at Lincoln out of sheer unfettered passion on the living room floor as clips from our movie play out on the TV and he says me, “And also because there’s cheating in it.”

“Wuthering Heights” is one of those names everyone’s always heard of, but no one’s actually ever read. Written by one of the Brontë sisters (Emily) and published in the UK about 200 years ago, it’s framed as a love story but really, it’s about obsession. Though here, they both mean pretty much the same thing.

Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship drives the book. When we meet them, they’re both kids and Cathy’s dad has just taken Heathcliff in as one of his own. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together and do what all children do. They play, they run wild, they eavesdrop. They get by until the Lintons move in when they’re teenagers. Edgar and Isabella are around Cathy and Heathcliff’s age but they’re totally different. When Cathy and Heathcliff first see their new neighbors, they end up in stitches at their sheer ridiculousness. “We laughed outright at the petted things,” Heathcliff declares, “We did despise them!” Only later does Edgar propose to Cathy, and only later does Cathy accept. “If I were in heaven,” she laments, “I would be extremely miserable.”

She doesn’t say it, but Cathy loves Heathcliff. “Whatever our souls are made of,” she insists, “His and mine are the same.” The main trouble lies in everything which goes years unsaid. What love is that which never manifests? The night before Cathy dies, Heathcliff spouts at her, “I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

This could be a beautiful thing. Tragedy, in the right hands, can turn delicate and sweethearted but here, it’s depraved. In the same conversation Heathcliff cries, “Don’t torture me till I’m as mad as yourself,” though he’s already too late. When promoting The Moment, Charli repeatedly mentions ‘the tension of staying too long.’ In the movie’s emotional climax, her on-screen character (also named Charli) admits, “I know it’s not chic to be the last person at the party.” After Cathy dies, Heathcliff steals off infernally. He becomes beastly, mad. When he comes to find out she’s really gone, he heaves inconsolable, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

You’re only ever really late because you stayed too long somewhere else. Would it kill you to have left sooner? Charli’s on-screen creative director rolls her eyes, “You’re not gonna die after an album cycle.” Aidan Zamiri, Charli’s real-life director, remarks in an interview, “Sometimes that holding on is the thing that breaks it.” After Cathy’s death, Heathcliff cannot, for the life of himself, let it rest. He goes after her offspring. He goes after her inheritance. Everything he can lay his eyes on which bears any relation to her, he must possess. He’s unrecognizable. He ekes out twenty vitriolic years, then dies hungry and alone in Cathy’s childhood bedroom.

In Emerald Fennell’s movie, we don’t get so far. It’s only half the book, but the movie ends when Cathy dies. Emerald Fennell cuts it off early. There’s no use in dragging this shit out.

Is what Conan O’Brien says to Charli xcx about the movie she made with her friend Aidan Zamiri. “I thought this was the truest depiction I’ve seen in memory,” Conan alleges leaning into his gigantic podcast microphone, “Of what [fame] is really like.” At some point, you must get so famous that it becomes a novelty to be normal.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play Cathy and Heathcliff, respectively, in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” As part of the press tour, Margot and Jacob do a moderated talk for Vogue Australia and light up most when they start talking about the photoshoot they just did (also for Vogue Australia). Margot sits up on the edge of her seat to ask Jacob if he saw the photos yet and for a second, the conversation exists only between them. “I had the best day ever,” Jacob says emphatically. Margot, Jacob, and the photographer cruising down Sunset Boulevard in a Cadillac. Jacob driving, Margot riding shotgun, and the photographer in the backseat. “It was so much fun,” Jacob can’t emphasize enough.

It’s so funny the way these people talk about shoots and being on set and how the best thing is when they feel most free to just do whatever they want. Charli said their cinematographer was following them on a handheld the whole time while shooting, so they could all go anywhere. You get to be even more free when you live your life, in theory. In that case, you can really do anything you wanted. You wouldn’t have to worry about tripping up the mic or getting hit by the wrong light. In The Moment, Charli’s constantly in the backseat of a car or being shuffled from meeting to rehearsal to fitting to meeting again. If this is fame, it must suck. She doesn’t even get to drive her own car. Something weird must happen to your head when the only moments you can be truest are those which look most contrived to everyone else.

These actors are always talking about how real things feel on set. Like for a moment, Margot and Jacob really were Cathy and Heathcliff. How much effort and construction it must take for them to get to that point of truth. It’s at least a little bit ironic that it takes so much planning to get to something free. No, it’s not factual. No, it’s not accurate at all. Emerald Fennell says this is the version of “Wuthering Heights” that existed in her head as a 14-year-old reading it for the first time. In fact, it’s really off. Everyone online is getting mad at how off it is. But it’s true to her and she gets the final say. Because she made it. Because it’s hers.

Some things are the same in the book as in the movie. Heathcliff was picked up off the street, he was named after a dead brother. Only in the movie, Cathy does the naming. She runs up to her father, elation in one hand, Heathcliff in the other, and praises Mr. Earnshaw with the sweetest words she can muster. “Oh,” her father begins self-satisfactorily, “So you like your new friend, do you?” Cathy’s only answer, “Very much, Papa. Very, very much.” She hesitantly offers up a name, watching her father’s face to see how it will take. Mr. Earnshaw repeats it twice. Ragged at first, then much softer. He beckons the boy over and tells him he is most heartily welcome in the house. Heathcliff.

Owning something means its yours. There’s both love and hatred in the act of possession—love in how you see yourself reflected back to you, hatred in how you don’t. Why won’t you love me? Why won’t you just do what I say? Owning something implies the ability to control it. After you’ve had something for a while, it gets hard to imagine ever letting it go.

“Can I dress him up?” Cathy asks breathily. “Yes, of course,” Mr. Earnshaw replies, “He shall be your pet.” There’s two ways to be possessed. One, you can be owned. Two, you can be consumed.

What happens is that Heathcliff turns up one day and sits tight-lipped smoking a pipe at dinner. Five years has passed and when Cathy asks if it’s been exciting, all Heathcliff has to say is, “At times.” Just to be cruel, Cathy asks Edgar from across the table if she’s mentioned Heathcliff any of these years only to hear him say out loud, “I do not believe so, my love.” Nonchalant to a fault. I’d rather kill you than let you know you’re killing me.

The natural progression of possession is jealousy. Heathcliff marries Isabella only to get under Cathy’s skin. Cathy draws out Edgar’s kiss when she’s sure Heathcliff’s looking. It’s a difficult thing only because the two make it such. This misery is self-compounding. No one can win when it gets like this. If I don’t own you, then prove it. If you don’t own me, then leave. Even if you use your sweetest voice, it’s no use now. The damage is in all the things you didn’t mean, all the ground you wouldn’t give up.

Cathy emphasizes her claim over Heathcliff only after she’s lost him. For a moment there, they were almost happy. For a second, they could almost make it work. Cathy realizes they’re doomed before Heathcliff does. Anything he does after only goes to make it worse. Cathy grows indignant when someone refers to Isabella as ‘Mrs. Heathcliff.’ “Do not call her that,” Cathy grits through her teeth. No one has any right to that name but her.

In writing the music for Wuthering Heights, Charli kept coming back to the phrase ‘elegant and brutal.’ This version of love becomes almost scary. You can only ever be cruelest to those that you love most. Cathy and Heathcliff spar with each other, but in doing so, they only pierce themselves. There’s a secret joy someone can take in spite. Wretched is the knowing part which chooses to win miserable than to lose happy. So it boils down to pride after all.

Charli xcx and Aidan Zamiri are sitting on two couches for another podcast, doing more promo for their movie, The Moment. They’re hosted by A24, who’s also their distributor, and they barely say a word about the film they made together other than saying the title at the same time about 37 minutes in. “For me it’s like, the second I feel bored,” Charli starts, “You feel dead,” Aidan finishes for her. “Yeah, like I talk about it with my therapist all the time.”

Being bored sometimes is just about the worst thing you can be. “How could it have gone worse?” I ask Lincoln in the car. We just saw The Moment and we’re still deep in recovery. “What’s a worse outcome than this movie being absolutely boring?” he asks. I laugh so hard only because it’s so true. “Like, all-the-way boring.”

On their respective couches, Charli and Aidan are still talking about being bored. “I actually felt really bored as a child a lot,” Aidan realizes. Charli jolts forward in her seat, “Me too! Me too…” Sometimes you get so bored, you drive yourself mad just for the sake of having something to do. When asked how she prepared for her role of Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Margot Robbie says she tried to access the mindset she had as a teenager. “I just remember feeling things so intensely at that age,” Margot reflects, “One tiny jab at that age… It would eviscerate you.”

Who ever has really all that much going on when they’re 14? This girl I know gets a far-off look in her eyes, sighs, then tells me her friend has a lot going on. I say, isn’t she, like, 10? And she goes, 11! Wait—no, you’re right. She’s 10. Beat. But her parents are getting a divorce.

“When I was 14,” Charli begins, “There was just a lot less embarrassment in general.” She was bored at home and on the Internet back when it still had a capital-I. Charli’s cringing at all the shit she did when she was 14, but Aidan’s cheering on every word she says. “So cool! It’s so cool.”

At 14, Emerald Fennell had just read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time. “When I first read it,” she says, “It just destroyed me.” Margot Robbie jumps in, “This is Emerald making you feel the way the book made her feel when she was younger.” Right at the beginning of shooting, Emerald said to Margot, “I want people to cry so hard they vomit.”

“Any feelings of love,” Margot admits, “I think probably I felt most deeply at that age, too.” In the final scene of Wuthering Heights, a young Heathcliff whispers to a young Cathy right before they fall asleep, “Catherine Earnshaw, I will love you til the day that I die, and forever after.” Despite it all, you still end up wanting to believe in their love. There’s a certain charm to feeling so much when you’re so young. Intensity can be endearing when it’s new. It’s why we forgive them. There’s no melodrama here, no irony, no self-awareness. There’s nothing to get in between you and whatever you’re feeling. In some ways, this’ll be the truest it’ll ever be. How tender things could be if you could preserve the feeling even after it’s passed. Who could ever fault you for wanting to do that?

Wuthering Heights is about what it means to be consumed, to be brought and pushed and stretched to extremity. It’s about obsession and compulsion and possession and watching things turn irrecognizable. In the book, Isabella says Cathy would’ve been alive were it not for Heathcliff. In the book, Nelly weaves Cathy and Heathcliff’s hair together after Cathy’s died and shuts the strands in a locket. Wuthering Heights is that thing you can’t look away from, that terrible thrill you get when something actually awful happens. It’s something like a car crash; you’d never wish for it, though now it’s here, you can’t say you don’t want to see how it went down. What you can’t look away from, you will start to see everywhere. Keep my eyes peeled away from you, this love steams impossible. Something like a blind devotion may never be enough. Heart sinks at the first sight of realizing this is not love, no matter how bad I might want it to be.

There’s a reason why the sweetest scene comes only when she’s died. You realize the truth only when it’s entirely impossible to consider anything else. Two people say they love each other, but rage hopelessly on in their distortions. You have so much on top the original thing that you can’t even see it anymore. It’s so underneath. One gets mad at the other. One doesn’t say it. One takes it personal. One doesn’t realize it. They keep missing each other. They’d take it the wrong way even if they didn’t. It was so much easier when they were kids. No one will admit it. By the time they grow up, they’ve gotten so used to not saying it that to do anything else would be treason. At what point do they become unrecognizable, even to each other? THIS IS A STORY OF VITRIOL, RESENTMENT, SPITE, JEALOUSY, IMAGE, OBSESSION, TORMENT, FIXATION, RELEASE, RUIN, DESTRUCTION, AND NEVER FXCKING SAYING WHAT YOU MEAN.

Charli means it all the way when she says she has to be obsessed. It’s the only way she knows how to work. It’s the only way she knows how to be. This shortness of breath, this endemic tension and anxiety. Duh, I feel like I’m in Wuthering Heights, a Safdie film, The Moment, some visual place where Sean Price William did all the cinematography. Did you know I met him at the DC weed store once? I forget the name now, it was some afterparty they didn’t know was happening until they got there. Duh… I mean, like, duhhh. Can it get any worse? Can it get any more obvious? Everything I write about I end up living it in one way or another. Bereaved in the corner of the Ramadan café. Puffed up and itchy in a way I’m just finding out about myself. It’s really the only way I can think to do it. Sometimes I seek it out. Sometimes it just happens. By my wish or not.

This is what happens when you don’t say it. This is why it’s so easy for me to go mad. Anytime I see anything, I go red with postulation. I get jealous of a person that’s never lived. Total infatuation. The image becomes all to me. It’s like I wish for my own demise. I can push it. I can be late. I can only really know how to get there if I get there fast. Imagine how bored I must be. Sometimes I don’t know if I love it or if I’ve just been doing it. No, that’s not what I meant. What it is, is something so singular. It’s owning something just to possess it. It’s slipping through even when you’re watching. Right as you get there, you already start to feel that you’re probably going to lose it.

The Moment ends when Charli’s album dies. She kills it by being extremely corny. The camera work is shaky and always moving. We see Charli turn red. We feel her pace accelerate. We watch her lose control of the very thing she made. Right before the last sequence, she monologues in a 5-minute-long voice note to her on-screen creative director, “I don’t have to worry about it being cool anymore or if it feels like me because it has nothing to do with me anymore.” In real life, when Charli’s actual creative director visits the set all she can think to say is, “You just look… so lame.”

The way these stories work is that it always ends up boiling down to the true and the untrue, and figuring out which is which, and mistaking one for the other, and making the choice so fucking late that the only thing you can really do is wait for the whole thing to play out as it was always going to, with or without you. Wuthering Heights is way more about the feeling. The details elude everyone involved but they also don’t matter. The Moment has constructed a world where the details are the only thing that matter. It’s why it’s so hard to get through but it’s also true. Two versions of Charli’s realness, releasing at (roughly) the same time. One is near-grotesquely inexact at times, the other almost claustrophobically-accurate. It’s not pretty or actual, but it’s true. It’s real, it’s lived. It means something has to die no matter which choice you make.

That’s the heart of this. Wuthering Heights is Charli. The Moment is Charli. What I feel is Charli. There’s a reason I’m so drawn to this girl. My life would be a lot easier if anyone understood what I meant when I say Charli xcx is my favorite artist. Lincoln echoes in my head when he says, “As always, I’m the only one that gets it.” Granted, he was talking about the new Danny L Harle record, but the sentiment still stands. I keep on saying the album is not the album, the movie is the album. I keep on thinking how Wuthering Heights is perfect for her. The movie thuds heavy and dark and incessant like she does. The movie can’t help itself. The movie swears it’ll die every half-act. The movie refuses to exist anywhere else but the extreme.

I want to go to the extreme with you. I want to feel my heart so deep it hurts. I want to reach for the true only through the false. Charli’s so cool. Charli cares so much. Charli’s never cared at all. From one girl who never says what she means to another, it’s a hard thing to admit how you can never admit you’re wrong. Charli is all feeling. She imparts it here.

You can switch out the title Wuthering Heights for the name Charli xcx, and you’d still get something that means the same thing in the end. Wuthering Heights is the both. Charli xcx is the everywhere. Wuthering Heights is offputting, it’s strange, it’s sensual and melodramatic. Charli xcx is trying to say something that’s never been said before, at least not like this. This is how “Wuthering Heights” feels now, even if it’s not how it felt then. No, it’s not factual. No, but it’s true.

Margot Robbie says of Emerald Fennell, “I knew she’d want me to be hitting the extremes of the character.” Charli says of Margot’s character, “It’s like, I wanna be her.” Margot says of Charli xcx (the real one), “You’re like Cathy, she cries at the drop of a hat.”

Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship destroys near-everyone around them. The love isn’t the main point, but the twisting is. THIS IS NOT LOVE. THIS IS REVENGE. This is about fixation. It’s about not being able to get it off your mind. It’s about taking one thing and pulling it every which way until it pops. It’s about pop. You can’t get it out of your head. It’s everywhere you go. You can’t escape it. It’s something that could drive you mad. It’s what she’s all about. Everything that you don’t say. Everything that you don’t mean. Everything that you mean and don’t say. Always speaking around the thing itself. If you cared enough, you’d figure it out. It’s something that you can’t help but feel, can’t help but be consumed by, can’t help but play up for the thrill of it. It’s extreme to everyone but you.

It’s about contradiction. It’s about wanting it both ways and getting it none. It’s about eternal frustration, maybe damnation. It’s about never being happy. It’s about trying to straddle both sides and not quite getting it right no matter how hard you try or how bad you want it. It’s about building a new wall to push against. It’s about being so right and so wrong. It’s about running far from what you just did, putting as much distance as you can between yourself and what just happened. It’s about a polar eclipse. It’s about feeling fated. It’s about being recreationally cruel. It’s about going even though you said you wouldn’t. It’s meeting someone more myself than I am. It’s about being yourself, not being yourself, being yourself, not being yourself. It’s about using something fake to say something truer than true. It’s about going to the extreme with you. The real thing is: there’s the thing that feels right, and there’s the thing that feels wrong, and sometimes you can make it so wrong that even the right thing doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s about your own doing. INTENSITY, JEALOUSY, EMOTION, TENSION, HEDONISM, SELF-DESTRUCTION. Charli so perfect here because who else could do what is being asked? Reconcile two oppositions and make it feel so seamless. Half old, half new. All Charli. All cinema. It’s all there.

I gotta let this shit GO… It’s only acceptable to be so desperate for so long. What can you do but let the thing kill itself, delay this fatal choice between the true and the untrue. Trust that which is eternal will not change, though all else will. Let me keep my future loves timid, then. My taste has been brief, but enough to last me til the earth retires.

I can be insolent. I can be stubborn. I can be bored and too consumed by cool for my own good. I can be so insecure I come off as confident. I can be so myself I almost end up as someone else. I can be extravagant in my emotion. I can be contrived even when I don’t mean to be. I can be perpetually there when the pendulum swings. I can see everything as either forever or never again. I can never find the in between. I can cry worse when you say what I want. I can have everything but not act like it. I can make it harder than it has to be. I’d like to call love the truest thing but actually it can be so faux. You can pass pretty much anything off as it if you really cared to. What’s a love without despair? What’s a life without misery? The boredom is implied. The jealousy comes with fries. FIN.

Quotations pulled from Wuthering Heights (2026), The Moment (2026), “Wuthering Heights” (1847), MoviePort’s interview with Charli xcx and Aidan Zamiri, Conan O’ Brien’s podcast episode with Charli xcx, Vogue Australia’s Forces of Fashion conversation with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, A24’s podcast episode with Charli xcx and Aidan Zamiri, Natalie Vertiz’s interview with the Wuthering Heights cast, Fandango’s interview with the Wuthering Heights cast, Alamo Drafthouse’s NYC post-screening live Q&A with Charli xcx and Aidan Zamiri, GQ’s Epic Conversation between Margot Robbie and Charli xcx, and of course, Lincoln.