Absurdism, surrealism, and maximalism

The contemporary aesthetics of Wuthering Heights and No Other Choice

Just watched Wuthering Heights (2026). Holy cow is that movie horny. In retrospect, that should have been no surprise from the director of Saltburn! Emerald Fennel, chill out, man.

In the movie, Catherine lives with her father, who is both a gambler and a drunk, in their house on the moors. One day he adopts a poor boy of her age, who she names Heathcliff. The two grow up together and fall in love, but just as they think to do something about it she marries the new neighbor, the wealthy Mr Linton. Heathcliff runs away, returns five years later rich, and the two have an affair that brings the movie to its climax. A bit like Great Gatsby, but a century earlier.

I was struck by the visual contrast between scenes filmed out on the wild moors, in fog and rain and some tepid sun, and those shot in the controlled lighting of a soundstage. The mansions of Catherine’s father and Mr Linton show off a fairytale absurdity: strawberries the size of your head; wallpaper painted to look like skin; a fireplace lintel made of stucco hands; a pile of liquor bottles ten feet high. Sometimes they play this for a laugh, but mostly it shows the grotesquery, idiocy, and wretched taste of the hyper-rich. The stark wild beauty of the moors stands in contrast as the site of Catherine and Heathcliff’s many trysts: the truth of one’s desire is plain, and harsh, and unforgiving.

There’s something going on with the maximalist aesthetic these last few years. Poor Things (2023) features similiarly over-the-top decor, and especially the design of the mad scientist.

Bugonia (2025), another Lanthamos joint, also shows bulbous flesh/cloth sets in the last chunk of the movie. I’ll say no more about that one. The earliest I can remember seeing this style was in the hotdog-fingered wackiness of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022).

It’s hard to put my finger on what this aesthetic is. Visually I think it tends to be round, fleshy, and saturated. It’s deployed to different effect in different movies, but it always seems to convey a sense of overstuffed absurdity -- a feeling which I also got from the opening scene of No Other Choice (2025). This scene introduces our main character as the family man, husband and father to two, having a typical Sunday barbeque. Their dogs, a pair of golden retrievers, patiently wait for scraps. His wife opens her birthday gift: a pair of golden dance shoes. The family comes together for a group hug, awash in the literal golden light of this picture-perfect moment. Though aesthetically it couldn’t be more different from the fleshy world of the other movies described, something rhymes in the way it layers elements of its ideal one over another until the whole thing feels like it must crash down like a jenga tower made of jello.

Is there a term for this style? I wonder if they have named themselves. Until they do, I dub them henceforth: fleshglorp. Long live the fleshglorp.