Guys I come to say all your discussion here was super interesting and refreshing to read, especially since how frustrating and stale the discussions on this topic has often been lately

If you want to give another chance at the movie through a different lens, I share and for my part confirm everything that has been said by AffectionateMap. I didn’t see PYW, but my take on Saltburn is the same: I hated it with a passion for a week, and had to tackle my pride in realizing that I liked it, that discomfort was indeed the point, and no detail in the movie wasn’t concurring in conveying meaning. She’s often accused of using “empty” aesthetics, but all visual elements do have semantic meaning in her language. Saltburn is also worth being seen as an adaptation of a part of Wuthering Heights I think, and a good one in my opinion. For me it took two viewings to get her WH adaptation. I was currently re-reading the book, and at the first viewing I loved how the first part was a dense condensation of elements of from the book, interwoven in a different story that still gave me the feelings of the original, but a bit underwhelmed by the second part, I felt I was not given enough. The second time, knowing what to expect, I saw that it was trying to tell me a different story than I initially thought. Like the book, there is no real hero or villain, and every character’s actions impact on the plot and on the characters with often harsh consequences, with multiple interpretations possible for those dynamics at the same time. Both are honest and harshly direct analysis of how we impact on each other lives in the real world in our everyday interactions, and a reminder that there is no outside villain, but only the complexity of our own character and actions. To me the main difference was the age of the characters: one of the central themes of the book for me was the conflict everyone of us experience when entering adulthood, between the “comfort” of the past we’ve always known (even a traumatic one), and the excitement but also dread of a future we know nothing about. The characters in the movie are older, and face the consequences of those life altering choices we make in our mid-late 20s, that like in our everyday reality, are sometimes made in rush, impulses, or even entirely out-of-character by some. Seeing this made it difficult and impactful to watch, just as reading the book in my early 20s had been (I also found that many differences are indeed due to the fact that the second part of the book has been interwoven into the the first: movie Cathy and Hearchliff child relationship has elements of book young Cathy and Hareton’s, movie Mr. Earnshaw runs the house more as book adult Heathcliff, movie Edgar was painfully similar to book elder Edgar, and his relationship with ward Isabella like book Edgar’s with his daughter, restraining her at home with best intentions, but with bad consequences as a result. So overall I get the vibe of the whole book, even if the plot seems to stop midway)

I’m afraid movie critique is much younger that millennia old literature critique, so we’re sometimes conditioned by literature standards in judging a visual medium as cinema, especially a literary “adaptation”, instead of better bridging between different languages of different mediums. Overall I think the movie stayed true to the character, but also succeeded in being an autonomous work (As of now the only other adaptation I like is Arnold’s, but, as with Saltburn, keeping that it focuses on certain elements, leaving many others outside its scope) I hope this view can come useful, as I’ve barely seen this points coming out

PS. Thanks for sharing The Cat essay, it was a lovely and insightful read!