When Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights appeared in 1848, many reviewers were scandalized, calling it “coarse and loathsome” and lamenting its lack of sympathetic characters and a moral. The social media debates over writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of the novel demonstrate that everything old is new again.
Many defenders of the movie find the source material just as unsavory as Victorian critics did. They’re happy to take on literary purists, even suggesting that only a misogynist would disdain Fennell’s revision of Brontë for modern tastes. Meanwhile, some of their opponents have decried the film as racist (because Fennell cast a white man as Heathcliff, whom the book describes as ambiguously ethnically “other”). All this discourse started when the trailer dropped and was already exhausting months ago. But … how’s the movie?
The deal
Somewhere in Yorkshire, possibly in the 18th century (there are bodices to be ripped), motherless young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) amuses herself by attending public executions. When her drunkard father (Martin Clunes) brings home foundling Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), the two children grow inseparable.
Then they grow up into Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and develop a heaving bosom and rippling pectorals, respectively, while Catherine’s hired companion, Nelly (Hong Chau), watches them with a suspicious eye. Catherine plots to escape her violent home by marrying rich Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). But after she spies on servants Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and Zillah (Amy Morgan) having a kinky tryst in the stable, her own feelings for Heathcliff awaken.
With Nelly’s help, misunderstanding separates the lovers. Catherine becomes the lady of Edgar’s Thrushcross Grange, which is basically the Saltburn mansion crossed with the Barbie Dreamhouse and redesigned by David Lynch. She befriends her husband’s eccentric ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). Everything is fine, if boring, until Heathcliff returns with money and a thirst for vengeance.
Will you like it?
Full disclosure: I love Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. This ain’t it. But then, neither was the lushly romantic 1939 version that persuaded me to read the book in the first place. For as long as filmmakers have been adapting this gothic story of obsession and generational trauma — whose author deliberately placed two layers of narrative insulation between us and its disturbed and disturbing protagonists — they’ve been watering it down into a more acceptable love story. So I gave Fennell the benefit of the doubt.
On the cinematic level, Wuthering Heights is a feast for the eyes. (Just set aside the disregard for Brontë’s own visual symbolism — a blond Catherine might have upset her more than anything else here.) The titular house is a stunning expressionist creation, all jutting staircases and jagged angles. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography leans into hyperrealism and evokes iconic film imagery (the red sky from Gone With the Wind) while giving a tender intimacy to green moors and interior candlelight.
When the action moves to the Grange, Wuthering Heights shifts into a positively surrealistic gear. Pulsing reds dominate the palette; Catherine wears gowns reminiscent of Princess Diana’s wedding or vinyl diner booths. Her bedroom has squishy walls designed to resemble her own skin, and when she’s ill, the prescribed leeches creep from her actual face onto its pasty facsimile.
All of this is deliciously creepy and fun, but what of the story? Most of the novel’s dialogue (a few famous scenes excepted) has vanished in favor of flat, “accessible” language. The multiple narrative layers are gone, too, along with most of Nelly’s ambivalent, shifting relationship to Catherine and Heathcliff, which serves in the book as a foil for our own.
Instead, we have broadly written characters, starting with a bratty Catherine who repels us more than she wins us over. The dreamy montages set to Charli XCX songs do the heavy lifting of her character development. Elordi’s portrayal of Heathcliff hints at the character’s passive-aggressiveness — how he practically goads the world to cast him as a villain. But the film is too enthralled by its own Byronic imagery to dissect his troubled character.
Only the interpretation of the hapless Isabella in Fennell’s screenplay is truly bold, in ways that are alternately refreshing and questionable. At least Oliver’s sly antics give us a break from scene after florid romantic scene designed to make BookTok swoon.
Fennell has said the film reflects her personal reading of the book as a teenager: Gone are the ghosts, the exhumations, the intricate framing, Heathcliff’s unforgivable brutality and anything else that might stop us from reveling in the doomed love of two very extra people.
Watching Wuthering Heights is a little like being trapped inside an early-’80s music video or reading an edgy Gen Z update of Classics Illustrated. There are worse things. Still, I can’t help worrying that, in our age of declining literacy, “Wuthering Heights” (as it’s styled on the posters) will replace Wuthering Heights entirely.
If you like this, try…
Wuthering Heights (1939; HBO Max, PLEX, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Sling TV, Tubi, YouTube Primetime, rentable): The Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon version does preserve the narrative framework and is a classic in its own right.
Wuthering Heights (2011; AMC+, Pluto TV, Tubi, rentable): Andrea Arnold (American Honey) cast a Black actor as Heathcliff in this more naturalistic rendering.
“Wuthering Heights” (five episodes, 1978; BritBox): This BBC version has been lauded for its faithfulness. There’s also a 2009 version (two episodes; PBS, PLEX) with Tom Hardy, a Luis Buñuel version, an MTV version, and, for that Olympic synergy, Layne Fargo’s smart and entertaining novel The Favorites, which transports the story into the world of competitive ice dance.
This article appears in February 18 • 2026.
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