Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a lavish, hot-blooded, frequently arresting piece of gothic showmanship—one that often looks like it cost a fortune to photograph and sometimes feels as if it spent that fortune on sensation rather than the slow poison of Brontë’s tragedy. The film, released by Warner Bros., casts Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, with Hong Chau as Nelly Dean, Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, and Alison Oliver as Isabella Linton.
Reviewed by Allan R. Ellenberger
Fennell’s move is of-the-moment: she accelerates Heathcliff and Cathy’s story into fever-romance of lust and wounded egos, with the moors newly imagined as a designer dystopia — blustery and tactile, billowing fabric and lurking shadow, the kind of “gothic” that’s always aware of how it’s performing for the camera. The film copiously adapts Brontë with a bold infusion of sensuality wrapped in sleek, fashion-forward stylization, offering richly textured and strikingly cinematic pleasure even when it drifts away from a canonical literary classic. That verdict—style as both the selling point and the stumbling block—mirrors the broader reception.
The synopsis, at least on paper, remains Brontë’s basic engine: a foundling outsider and a wild Yorkshire girl form an elemental bond, and when class, pride, and injury corrupt it, the love metastasizes into obsession and ruin. Fennell’s film is far less interested in the novel’s complex architecture—its nested narrators (Lockwood and Nelly Dean) and its generational echo chamber—than in compressing the first blaze into a single, overheated chamber drama. Brontë’s original is famously framed and re-framed, with Lockwood hearing the tale through Nelly and the community’s long memory, an “unusual and complex” structure that makes the moorland tragedy feel like folklore turned toxic.
Fennell, by contrast, leans into immediacy: passion now, consequence later, and the latter is often more aesthetic than existential. That choice produces the movie’s undeniable strengths. Robbie plays Cathy less as a waif of romantic suffering than as a creature of appetite and will—magnetic, reckless, and socially cornered. Elordi’s Heathcliff, shot like a predatory statue brought to life, is all simmer and threat; Fennell understands that the story’s eroticism is inseparable from its violence, and she stages the pair as if love itself is a form of weather. In isolated moments, it works beautifully: bodies arranged like a curse, interiors glowing with the wrong kind of warmth, the moors looking not “picturesque” but possessed.
Yet the very decisions that make the film watchable are also what ignite its loudest arguments—because Wuthering Heights is not simply a romance; it is a novel about class, cruelty, social manufacture, and the afterlife of trauma. One major controversy centers on Heathcliff’s identity. Brontë’s text repeatedly marks him as an outsider with “dark” features—racially and socially othered—and critics have accused the film of “whitewashing” by casting Elordi and sanding down that dimension. Another flashpoint is regional authenticity: Fennell’s version has been criticized for flattening Brontë’s Yorkshire specificity into a generalized prestige-gothic gloss.
The most contentious issue, however, centers around Isabella Linton. In the novel, Isabella is lured into a marriage that becomes a trap—an abuse narrative rendered with Victorian restraint but unmistakable moral clarity. Framing Isabella as someone who wants to be humiliated shifts that power dynamic towards something read by some viewers as BDSM imagery problematically bordering on fetishization—a deviation from Brontë’s original plot that hits differently when we as a culture are working through rampant abuse in media and its relationship to romance. Fennell has spoken at length in interviews about her take being her “version” of the story, not an adaptation: She took liberties. She drew from her own memory and feelings about reading the book. But people are still talking about it, because it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of adaptation: Should they amplify a story’s themes, or are they fine just taking its title and steam?
Comparing Fennell's version to the 1939 canonical film is useful because William Wyler's version, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, truncates and streamlines as well. Wyler's film famously only depicts part of the novel and removes the second generation completely, transforming Brontë's winding tale of revenge into a sleek tragic romance. The 1939 film is also “prestige” in the old sense: mournful, reverent, sculpted by Gregg Toland’s black-and-white cinematography, and honored accordingly (multiple Oscar nominations, an Oscar win for Toland). It has become such a pillar of screen heritage that it was added to the National Film Registry in 2007. Wyler’s film may soften Brontë, but it preserves the ache; it understands that the story’s power lies in yearning and punishment, in the spiritual vacancy left when love becomes a weapon.
Fennell’s version, on the other hand, is closer to a provocation—high-fashion gothic with bruises—and that can be exhilarating until you realize what it trades away. The novel’s chill comes not from sex but from consequence: Heathcliff’s obsession is a social cancer that spreads across households and generations, told through narrators who themselves become part of the contagion. When the 2026 film chooses carnality as the dominant language, it sometimes short-circuits the story’s most terrifying element: not that Cathy and Heathcliff desire each other, but that their damaged desire reorganizes an entire moral universe.
Still, there’s a reason audiences are showing up. The film opened at No. 1, drawing a predominantly female audience, and it has already demonstrated serious commercial traction. Fennell knows how to have a moment, and she did create one: a Wuthering Heights movie that doubles as film and thinkpiece engine, buoyed by the omnipresent millennial retention tool of also being a forward-leaning musical, dancing along even when the plot runs dry.
Have you watched the new version of Wuthering Heights? Is, what did you think? Please comment, rate and share this review.
Add comment
Comments