Yes, it's very slow, but that's not the core of the problem: the heart of the problem is that there is no heart. I cannot relate to anyone in the film. I wanted to cheer on Heathcliff, but it soon becomes apparent why that's incredibly difficult to do. The characters are mostly just boorish and disgusting.

Andrea Arnold's take on a well-known tale falls flat for a number of reasons. Her hand-held camera, non-linear montage, and bouts of frenzied physicality arguably complement her two tales of modern ennui and angst, Red Road and Fish Tank. However, they seem incongruous matched against a classic from the literary canon. The audience coming along expecting to see a period piece are getting a surprise, and unfortunately it is not a pleasant one. They were the ones walking out at the screening I went to. The writing was on the wall when their heart sank as the curtains whirred into place and settled on a 4:3 aspect ratio. That was a bizarre decision - these moors, this landscape, demand widescreen.

The decision to spend most of the film with the early years of Heathcliff and Cathy also seems ill-conceived, as the two youngsters frolic in the mud for an eternity without the story moving forward very much. They are earthy people of and from the land, the film screams, like the interminable procession of animals we see depicted. We get that in the first ten minutes - the rest of the time we are just going over established territory.

The return of the now successful Heathcliff in the latter half of the film means the grown up cast having the same effect as substitutes in a football game - imbibing the audience/spectators with a glimmer of hope. Alas, it is not to be, as the actor playing Heathcliff is wooden beyond belief, pipping the actor playing Edgar for the prize. The actresses around them can act, but it is a poor return on the ticket price. The film overtly attempts to appeal on visual grounds and as a result dialogue appears to have been an after-thought, as most lines are flat and predictable. The racial epithets are not shocking; they seem more a cynical ploy to garner publicity.

TV frame, incongruous mise-en-scene, poor casting and dodgy racial politics - any one of these could sink a film, but all four together is a very tough sell. The biggest sin, however, is to take Wuthering Heights and imbue it with absolutely no passion at all. The moors look suitably wild, and there is a strong sense of mud, but beyond that there are few positives to take from this film.

My experience was so drastically opposed to what I'd heard about this film in the newspapers that I was going to write a shocked review here; but I see that it has already all been said. Wilfully obscure narrative (I went with someone who had never read the book and had to explain to him afterwards who was who and what had happened, and why),self-indulgent overuse of wildlife shots and arty camera angles (once is good; twice is good; ALL THE TIME is tedious),important plot developments whisked over in the joints between one scene and the next, poor performances from the adult actors, jerky camera-work, insufficient lighting, and a variety of deliberately repulsive scenes of slaughter, necrophilia, blood-sucking and copulation in the mud (and I'm not talking about that bizarre bog scene between Cathy and Heathcliff, clearly intended to be very significant since it was repeated at the end...)

A lot of the time I felt I was being battered over the head with the director's insistence that This Is a Very Important Metaphor but simply didn't understand what the shot of a beetle, or a horse's flank, or a patch of stone, or yet another rainstorm, was supposed to be saying. (The one thing I didn't notice, interestingly, was that the film is in Academy ratio rather than widescreen - probably because the vast majority of the pictures I watch are not in widescreen and in fact I generally dislike it, so I certainly wasn't conscious of that as a drawback.) To be fair, my other companion, who adores the novel, thought the film was the closest she'd ever seen to capturing the spirit of the book, although she too was somewhat disappointed in the 'adult' section.

I suppose you could say that it was a disquieting film of a disquieting book, in which none of the characters were sympathetic because none of the characters in the original are sympathetic: for my part I found myself roused to a furious dislike and resentment, so was at least not indifferent to it. I didn't walk out of what was a sparsely-attended screening -- I didn't even allow myself to disturb my neighbours by looking at my watch -- but I fantasised about being able to leave and was longing for the experience to end.

I think the film has power, which is why I haven't marked it lower than I have. I also think that in many ways it is a bad piece of film-making, more akin to a pretentious video installation than the telling of a complicated and violent story.

The wind really does 'wuther' like that in Yorkshire, though...