Áilín Quinlan: Some date night... a poor film and hubby slithered off to another flick

It was, in fairness, a good idea. Dinner and a movie for Valentine’s.

We hadn’t done it in years, don’t ask me why, but you know how life goes. The days are long, the years fly by, and the moment comes when you realise you haven’t gone out on Valentine’s Night in donkey’s years.

A week or two previously, we’d done the dinner-and-a-movie thing for Hamnet; a Thai meal in Ballincollig and then off to The Reel.

A very good night was had by all.

The meal was excellent and Hamnet is what I’d call a Blue Moon of a film. The kind that that only comes along once in a blue moon. It was that good.

On this second outing, the Thai restaurant was equally good but “ Wuthering Heights” (inverted commas and all), released in time for St Valentine’s Day, didn’t cut it. Not for me, anyway.

I’d mentioned to a friend that we were going to see the film. She swooned. She loved Wuthering Heights, she gasped; she’d done it in school, under the guidance of a really fabulous English teacher who’d brought the story alive.

Alas, Emerald Fennell didn’t do the same for me. Far from it.

We settled back in The Reel’s huge and fabulously comfortable reclining seats as the film opened with a repulsive scene featuring an aroused nun and a wide-eyed little girl observing a hanged man’s appendage.

This was unpleasantly reminiscent of an early scene in One Battle After Another in which a woman holds a gun to the head of a seated man, while forcing him to carry out a sex act on himself.

I’d shut that one down fast.

“Ah, God, no,” I groaned now.

My husband rapidly decamped to Crime 101, a film that was just starting next door.

The disappointments continued – in the novel the Wuthering Heights mansion is a formidable fortress-style 16th century farmhouse on the bleak west Yorkshire moors. Here it was an unattractive building in shiny black modern-looking brickwork with a huge centre arch and nothing to recommend it.

The film seemed to be hung up on black, white and red – the colours constituted much of the interior décor and Cathy’s increasingly tiresome spangly wardrobe.

It all reminded me of the old fairytale in which a queen pricks her finger while sewing at a black windowsill during a snowstorm. As drops of blood fall out onto the snow, she dreams of having a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as the ebony in the window frame.

Maybe Emerald Fennell (who wrote and directed) was channelling Snow White? But, er, no, not quite, given the BDSM scene in the stables where a pair of young servants have sex with a horse’s bridle. Or the masturbation out on the moors. Or the unpleasant, skin-coloured bedroom wall which was based on Catherine’s skin, veins, freckles and all. Or the suggestive dough-pounding and the filling of beds with eggs in blatant attempts to achieve cheap erotic effects. Or that thing with the fish, which I’ll get to in a second.

The female costumes were off – Margot Robbie’s gowns were a mishmash of styles and shiny fabrics interspersed with lots of, yes, blinding red-and-white ensembles.

The jewellery was wrong too; big, flashy and fake-looking. Bling and gew-gaws. Someone said it was supposed to be vintage Chanel (em, why? In a film set in the 18th century?)

There were coloured sunglasses and a wedding dress that looked like it came straight from the 1980s.

There was the dinnertime scene where Robbie sticks her finger into the mouth of a big, cooked fish set in clear jelly. Another too-obvious stab at eroticism. I hated it. All of it.

Many of the staff at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, west Yorkshire, said they loved “ Wuthering Heights”.

But then, you must remember that these employees are saturated in the Brontes and their work and may simply have appreciated the change in atmosphere and the different vibe of the movie; one of them is quoted as saying it was like a fever dream. But it wasn’t for me, not at all.

Honestly, I didn’t mind that Robbie held on to her flowing blonde Barbie-movie tresses (Cathy’s hair was brown), or that she and Jacob Elordi were much older than the book’s characters (in the part of the novel where they embark on their young, intense romance, Cathy and Heathcliff are adolescents, whereas Robbie is in her mid-30s and Elordi is 28).

What saved this film for me was the sheer talent of Robbie, Elordi, and Martin Clunes who played Mr Earnshaw.

Their magnificent performances rescue it from the lewdness, the awful interior sets, the surreal, glittery gowns, the sunglasses with the red lenses, the butchery of Emily Bronte’s classic Gothic novel, and all that over-cooked, overheated and overblown sensuality. (God, this pair literally sucked each other’s faces off).

The other very strong points of the movie are the breathtaking outdoor landscapes, the huge boulders and dizzying views, the sheer sweep and cinematic magnificence of the moors (even if all that rain and wind and fog is a bit too reminiscent of our recent endless wet, windy, foggy January followed by a February that hasn’t shown much change in mindset.)

As it turned out, the Wuthering Heights-with-inverted-commas really wasn’t, to my mind, a successful St Valentine’s Night date night – and not only because my date disloyally slithered off next door to watch Barry Keoghan doing his psychopathic thug thing.

It all just went on too long. I got tired of the sneaking around, the besotted murmuring, the sex-in-the-mist, and the sticking of fingers into each other’s mouths.

I was long weary of Wuthering Heights-with-inverted-commas by the death scene and eager to get to the top of the ladies’ loo queue.

As I’ll say to my friend the next time I meet her, she was better off staying at home.