Emily Brontë’s only novel—the 1847 classic Wuthering Heights—is a grim, complex tale of corrosive obsession that centers on the doomed relationship between Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of a well-off farming family in the Yorkshire moors, and her adoptive brother, Heathcliff, whom her father found abandoned on the streets of Liverpool. As children, they form a deep bond, and when she decides, as a teenager, to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton for typically selfish reasons, Heathcliff rashly and suddenly leaves the Wuthering Heights estate; he returns, years later, mysteriously wealthy and with vengeance on his mind. He embarks on a plan that spans many years and involves untold depths of depravity. A new film adaptation, written and directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), stars Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein) and premieres in theaters on February 13. It’s depraved, as well—mainly, in how it twists Brontë’s story to transform an unforgivable villain into a tragic romantic lead.

Brontë told her story primarily through two narrators: Nelly Dean, the Earnshaws’ longtime servant; and Mr. Lockwood, who’s renting the Lintons’ former home from an older Heathcliff, who now owns it. It’s an early indication that Heathcliff—whose plan was to destroy Cathy’s husband and everything he loved—was, in fact successful. One part of his horrific scheme involved him marrying Edgar’s naïve sister, Isabella, even though he had nothing but contempt for her; after they eloped, he was brutal to her, and it’s very strongly implied that he raped her in order to impregnate her with an heir—a son, whom he also physically and verbally abused, and who became a key element in his loathsome plan.

Fennell tosses out the two narrators—Lockwood is completely absent, and Nelly (played by the great Hong Chau) gets relatively little to do. The filmmaker also throws out almost all of Heathcliff’s yearslong revenge plan, which fundamentally alters the story. He does, in a fit of pique, marry Isabella, but the reason he does so is vague, at best—after all, he doesn’t have any multigenerational conspiracy in mind. In a highly questionable twist, the film frames his and Isabella’s relationship not as an abusive one, but as a BDSM arrangement—one in which Isabella clearly gives her consent. (Fennell even regrettably plays the sub-dom dynamic for laughs, with Isabella crawling around on all fours and barking like a dog.)

In Fennell’s interpretation, Heathcliff has no grand plan, other than to try to win Cathy back, and she seems to be on board, carrying on a sexual affair with him right under Edgar’s nose. Heathcliff isn’t an amoral agent of chaos in this film, as he is in the book. He’s just a mopey, lovelorn, and—not incidentally—very attractive romantic hero, who isn’t abusive at all; instead, he’s quite generous in his affections, carnal and otherwise. It’s so far afield from Brontë’s book, in fact, that it almost feels like a deeply problematic fix fic, which is only compounded by Fennell’s baffling choice to change Heathcliff—described as “a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect”—into a white man.

Fennell’s movie, despite its considerable faults, is gorgeous to look at; the moors are portrayed as stunning vistas, and the sets and costumes are eye-popping—particularly inside the Linton estate, which attains a level of surreal excessiveness that one used to see only in Ken Russell films. For instance, Linton notes how he had Cathy’s room painted exactly the same color as her lovely skin—complete with her freckles—and a sculpture above the fireplace resembles hundreds of white human hands, overlapping as they reach up the wall in a jarring and arresting image. Cathy’s dresses, by costume designer Jacqueline Durran (Barbie), have a marvelously avant-garde, haute-couture daring. Robbie and Elordi are both fine actors, and they do their best with what they’re given, as do Shazad Latif (Nautilus) as Edgar and Alison Oliver (Task) as Isabella. Unfortunately, it’s all in the service of a bizarre and misguided attempt to rehabilitate one of literature’s most detestable monsters.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.