ELLE Exclusive: How Emerald Fennell And Charli xcx Turn Wuthering Heights Into A Fever Dream

Few novels have haunted literature and popular culture quite like Wuthering Heights. Since its publication in 1847, Emily Brontë’s singular work has resisted easy categorisation, unsettling readers with its raw emotional violence, morally ambiguous lovers, and a passion that feels closer to possession than romance. Cathy and Heathcliff are not aspirational figures; they are elemental, almost mythic forces. Their love is obsessive and eternal, qualities that have ensured the novel’s afterlife across art and culture. 

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From Kate Bush’s ethereal 1978 anthem to countless screen adaptations, Wuthering Heights has repeatedly been reinterpreted through the lens of each generation’s fears, fantasies and desires. Now, Academy Award– and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell brings her own bold reimagining to the story, one that leans into its sensuality, madness, and emotional extremity, while infusing it with a strikingly contemporary sonic and cinematic language.

Produced by Warner Bros. Pictures, Fennell’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, alongside Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, and Ewan Mitchell. While the film promises searing performances and undeniable chemistry from its cast, one of its most exciting elements lies in its music, original tracks composed by British pop icon Charli xcx.

For Fennell, Charli was not simply a collaborator, but an obsession long in the making.  “I've been obsessed with Charli xcx since I first knew about her, when she was, I think, like 15 and making stuff in her bedroom. I just think she's so unbelievably talented.”

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Their creative relationship traces back to Promising Young Woman, where Charli’s 2017 track “Boys” plays in the film’s opening moments, written into the script itself.  “Her song ‘Boys’ is the first song in Promising Young Woman, which I had written into the script, I love it so much.”

In WUTHERING HEIGHTS, however, the collaboration deepens into something far more immersive. For Fennell, music is not decorative, it is  emotional, and transformative.  “To me, music is especially important if you want to elicit a physical reaction, to get people to feel something, and on this film, we wanted audiences to feel so deeply.”

The challenge, of course, lay in reconciling the intensity of Charli xcx’s modern, hyper-emotional sound with a story rooted in a specific historical period. Rather than imposing rigid boundaries, Fennell chose intuition over instruction.  “But it can be quite difficult to make music for something that is set in a certain period. You have to decide what your boundaries are.”

Instead of assigning scenes or directions, Fennell took a radical leap of trust. “I sent the script to Charli with a view to asking her simply if she had an emotional response to it, would she like to make a song about it? It wasn't even like, ‘here's the scene.’ It was just, ‘what does this make you feel?’”

Charli’s response exceeded every expectation.  “And she called me and asked if she could do an album. Of course I said yes.” What followed was an outpouring of music that redefines what a period-film soundtrack can be, untethered from convention, yet deeply aligned with the story’s emotional core.  “And then she just started sending me just the most incredible things that were new, sexy, emotionally engaging.”

The result is not merely a soundtrack, but a parallel emotional universe, one that mirrors the feverish, uncontainable energy of Cathy and Heathcliff’s bond. In giving Charli xcx complete creative freedom, Fennell embraced collaboration as an act of surrender rather than control.  “I think that's the thing that's so wonderful about getting to work on a movie like this — you are just looking for people to collaborate with you, to give them a lot of space to make stuff and to have a response and not to be too prescriptive.”

For Fennell, that freedom led to something rare and deeply personal.  “It's just been the most thrilling thing in the world, and it's now my favorite album of all time.”

In reimagining Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell doesn’t attempt to tame its chaos. Instead, she amplifies it, through image, performance, and sound. With Charli xcx’s music pulsing through its veins, this adaptation positions Brontë’s story not as a relic of the past, but as something urgent, erotic, and emotionally unfiltered.

More than a literary adaptation, Wuthering Heights becomes a reminder of why the story has endured for nearly two centuries: because some loves are too intense to be moral, too wild to be contained, and too powerful to ever truly die.

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