'Wuthering Heights' Review: Emily Brontë Is Rolling In Her Grave — But Watch This AO3 Fanfiction Anyway

The most accurate introduction to my experience of this film might just be a Letterboxd review I read after the movie ended; “I was promised a freaky-ass movie. All I got were broken egg yolks.”

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Let’s begin here: Wuthering Heights has never been an easy novel to read, let alone understand. There are books that invite adaptation and others that actively resist it, and Emily Brontë’s 1847 work firmly belongs to the latter. Published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, it bewildered Victorian critics who expected moral coherence and received instead a narrative steeped in cruelty and racial ambiguity, class hostility, and a structural audacity that still feels relevant because have we moved ahead of the curve?

Charlotte Brontë, in her posthumous defence of her sister’s work, insisted that Emily wrote “as if she knew it to be true.” That truth was violent. And yet, almost every cinematic rendering of Wuthering Heights has attempted to sentimentalise it.

Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, enters a lineage already crowded with reinterpretations that span languages and cinematic philosophies. William Wyler’s 1939 film, perhaps the most famous, immortalised Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff but amputated the second half of the novel, ending at Catherine’s death and thus transforming a cyclical generational tragedy into romantic martyrdom.

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Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version leaned into brooding sensuality but still foregrounded romance over structural critique. Coky Giedroyc’s 2009 ITV miniseries remains one of the few to honour the second generation, allowing Brontë’s meditation on inheritance and emotional contagion to fully unfold. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation was the most radical in recent memory, casting a Black actor as Heathcliff and foregrounding the racial violence implicit in the text, stripping the story of orchestral sentimentality and replacing it with mud, breath and raw physicality.

And the novel’s reach has never been confined to Britain. Yoshishige Yoshida’s Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Arashi ga oka), released in 1988, transplanted the story to medieval Japan, reframing Brontë’s tale of obsession and hierarchy within feudal codes of honour and social order. The film was shown in competition at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, a reminder that Wuthering Heights is one that filmmakers continually reshape to reflect their own cultural anxieties.

Fennell’s version, glossy and operatic, is simply the latest attempt to translate that myth for a contemporary audience,  though whether it captures the novel’s rage as successfully as its predecessors is another matter entirely.

On a narrative level, the film adheres to the familiar arc: the orphaned Heathcliff is brought into the Earnshaw household; he forms an intense childhood bond with Catherine; class hierarchy fractures their unity; Catherine chooses Edgar Linton; Heathcliff returns wealthy and vengeful; tragedy unfolds. But what is omitted is as revealing as what remains. Lockwood, the outsider whose narrative frame destabilises reader certainty,  is marginalised. Hindley’s cruelty is streamlined into a more generalised patriarchal hostility. The entire second generation, so essential to Brontë’s exploration of cyclical trauma and moral ambiguity, vanishes.

This structural truncation is not simply a matter of runtime. It alters the philosophical argument of the novel. Wuthering Heights is not just about doomed love; it is about how environments reproduce violence. The second generation offers not redemption exactly, but transformation,  a suggestion that trauma can mutate rather than simply calcify. Without it, the story collapses into romantic fatalism.

More troubling still is the treatment, or near erasure — of Heathcliff’s racial and ethnic ambiguity. In the novel, Mr. Earnshaw describes him as a “dark-skinned gypsy” found in Liverpool, a port city deeply entangled in Britain’s colonial and slave-trade networks. Critics for decades have debated Heathcliff’s origins: Irish? Indian? Romani? Black? Mixed-race? Colonial orphan? The ambiguity is deliberate and potent. What matters is that he is marked as racially and socially different. His humiliation is not merely personal; it is systemic. He is racialised within the domestic sphere.

To cast a white Heathcliff, and then largely sidestep the question of race altogether, is to remove a foundational tension from the text. Heathcliff’s vengeance, in this version, risks reading as temperamental brooding rather than the long gestation of social exclusion. 

Linus Sandgren’s cinematography renders the Yorkshire moors with operatic grandeur. The landscape is not passive scenery but a living organism, windswept, inhospitable, sublime in the Burkean sense of terror intertwined with beauty. Interiors glow with candlelit decay; silk and lace are framed against mud and bone. The visual language borrows less from the stark realism of Arnold’s 2011 film and more from the heightened romanticism of Fennell’s own Saltburn: erotic, decadent, deliberately composed for visual seduction.

Margot Robbie’s Catherine is magnetic, and knowingly theatrical. She captures Catherine’s volatility but softens her cruelty. In the novel, Catherine is capable of breathtaking selfishness; her decision to marry Edgar is explicitly economic, rooted in class aspiration. “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now,” she confesses, a line that exposes the raw class calculus beneath her romantic rhetoric. In the 2026 adaptation, that calculus is present but blunted. Her ambition feels emotional rather than material. The structural violence of class is displaced by the psychology of longing.

Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff, meanwhile, is compelling in isolated moments, particularly in the emotional sequences, which are among the film’s strongest passages. These glimpses of pre-socialised intimacy between Cathy and Heathcliff briefly capture the novel’s central conceit: that their bond precedes language, precedes hierarchy, precedes even morality. They are, as Catherine famously declares, the same being. Every time Elordi said “Cath”…... something moved in my heart or maybe it’s my love for the actor.

In Brontë’s text, their obsession is not erotic in a conventional sense, a reader would imagine it as quite metaphysical and annihilating. A bond destabilises households, infects marriages and destroys children. Heathcliff’s grief at Catherine’s death is not poetic which gives the ick of it being grotesque, bordering on necrophilic in its intensity. He begs her ghost to haunt him. He would rather be tormented than left in peace. 

Fennell gestures toward this morbidity which we know she does very well, everyone loves Saltburn, sex intertwined with death, desire brushing against decay, but this time the silver screen rarely commits to genuine discomfort. The film is visually daring but emotionally shallow. The two most devastating passages in the novel, Catherine’s confession to Nelly and Heathcliff’s monologue after her death — are staged with reverence but not rupture. Something I expected to move me with every word being said but rather it happened like she was reading a manuscript.

This tension speaks to a broader issue in contemporary adaptation culture: the aestheticisation of darkness without its ideological teeth. Gothic literature, particularly by women writers, has often been sanitised for mass consumption. Think of how Jane Eyre adaptations frequently foreground romance while muting colonial critique embedded in Bertha Mason’s character. Similarly, Wuthering Heights is repeatedly reframed as a tragic love story rather than social horror.

There is, undeniably, pleasure in this film. It believes in cinema as spectacle and trusts the audience to sit with long, wind-lashed silences. It lets the audience indulge in sensuality without apology. In an era when many films are designed for algorithmic afterlife rather than theatrical immersion, that ambition feels almost radical. But ambition without thematic rigour risks emptiness.

Kate Bush’s 1978 “Wuthering Heights” understood that instinctively. Singing from Catherine’s ghostly perspective, Bush leaned into hysteria and melodrama, her windswept music video capturing the novel’s strangeness in a way many full-length adaptations have not. It was theatrical, uncanny, and unafraid of madness. Fennell’s film, by contrast, often feels intent on being beautiful before it is destabilising.

Interestingly, it is Charli XCX’s music that injects some needed volatility. With her generational hold and hyper-emotional pop sensibility, she brings a modern intensity that the screenplay sometimes lacks. Her sound,  sharp and cuts through the prestige gloss and briefly restores the chaos at the heart of Brontë’s story. Maybe she confused casting an Indian origin heathcliff to getting an Indian origin artist.

Perhaps this version will resonate with viewers encountering the story for the first time. Perhaps it will ignite renewed interest in Brontë’s text. Adaptations need not replicate; they can reinterpret, critique, modernise. Fidelity is not the only measure of success.

But Wuthering Heights is not simply a love story that can be extracted from its socio-political soil without consequence. It is a novel about poverty, power, racialisation, and the way love can blur into possession. Strip away those layers, and what remains is visually sumptuous but philosophically thin.

Emily Brontë wrote a book that refuses domestication. It is structurally fragmented, morally ambiguous, resistant to comfort. This adaptation dresses it in silk and candlelight, frames it in golden-hour splendour, and lets the wind howl through exquisitely designed sets.

The wind still rages. I only wish the story had been allowed to do the same. But this deserves a watch on the big screen. 

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