Wuthering Heights (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Sometimes even the best filmmakers stumble. 

There's no denying Emerald Fennell's craft, here or elsewhere, but I simply can't understand what she was thinking about while attempting to adapt this material. Wuthering Heights is one of those mythic "unfilmable" titles that never fails to disappoint when removed from Emily Brontë's glorious prose. And yes, despite my personal affection for Peter Kominsky's 1992 adaptation for its Gothic intensity and steamy young stars Juliette Binoche, Janet McTeer, Jeremy Northam, and Ralph Fiennes in his feature film debut, it too struggles to bear up under the sheer weight of its ambitious task of adapting the entire plot. 

A quick note: for whatever reasons, this film has generated more online hubbub than most in recent memory, often accompanied by lengthy claims to knowing what the novel is "about." It's about classism. It's about trauma. It's about star-crossed lovers. It's about necrophilia. And, usually, these claims of enlightenment also claim to be the only one with that special insight. My pro tip for you is to ignore such claims. Anyone who wants to boil down a work as complex and vast in scope as Wuthering Heights to being "about" one thing is a fool who ignores much to aggrandize a limited perspective.

Surely, said I, surely Fennell will be up to her usual subversive tricks. When handling what I consider to be a story in the form of a highly organized nightmare -- a labyrinth of internecine cruelties enacted by stupid rich sociopaths on the only people they could enjoy life with -- Fennell will surely approach from a unique angle. Perhaps the resident servant of the Heights, Nelly Dean (played here by always thrilling Hong Chau), could be our protagonist: after all, she maneuvers her way into positions of influence and thus power in the mad power-plays happening around her. As a more antiheroic lens through which we could view the story in a new light, Nelly Dean could have been Fennell's inlet into an inspiring take on the endlessly reproduced tale. That's what Fennell did in Promising Young Woman and Saltburn alike, the latter even including more than a hint of Gothic aesthetic, which would have been all the more appropriate in this actual Gothic material.

Yet here we are, presented with this mess of anachronistic pop culture narcissism, glorying in its own trashy cheapening of the material while failing to provide us with anything it promised. Like a fever dream of horny high school fantasy, we're told a mere fraction of the story of Heathcliff and Cathy as if by AI-filtered summary of the novel. Narratively taking its structure from the famed 1939 film (with Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and David Niven), which only told the first half of the story and set a dangerous precedent for most adaptations that have followed, the internal logic of the story collapses along with any pretense it has for thematic completion. At our screening, my friend frustratedly said something to the effect of "that was it?", to which I could only nod in annoyed sympathy. If you're going to retell such a classic, at least do it in an interesting way.

Which is the other problem I had with this film: the film itself. We could talk for pages about casting, but not about the tired online hullabaloo that needs to collectively do its historical homework on race and racial identifiers. We could talk for pages about acting: Chau is worth watching here, but Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are deeply uncomfortable to watch for their flat, breathy performances, which was really disappointing given this operatic opportunity. But the spectacle of rural, Gothic Yorkshire is undone time and again by confounding production design and lackluster cinematography (so. much. fog. And this was actually filmed in Yorkshire!). The Heights appears to be entombed in a protrusion of obsidian rising from a rocky moor, which would be maybe interesting if there were volcanoes nearby. Come to think of it, let's just move the setting to the rim of a volcano -- at least there could be interesting visual parallels to the existential precariousness between barren wilderness and boiling, seething, destructive passion -- but there's nothing so interesting here. Apart from a laughably candy-colored red hue repeated as the single visual motif so often it even appears in the Heights dining room. As the entire waxed floor.

Worse, the film promised us sex. This was meant to be the most erotically explicit, even explicitly kinky version of the story. I was down for that; who needs faithfulness to yet another retread of this story? If we're going to dive into the story's eroticism -- which is completely valid -- let's stop tiptoeing and go for it! There is an argument to be made for no explicit sex in the novel: if you want to believe (frankly unrealistically, but you do you) Cathy and Heathcliff and various other characters around them are chaste and abstinent the whole time, you may do so without dishonoring the original text, perhaps allowing that to inform their desperation, madness, and the ultimate tragedy of the whole saga. But that's been done to death. Fennell, rather than giving us a new hard-R vision of the tragedy, plays things distractingly safely. Other than a little skin in a couple scenes and some partially clothed thrusting -- mostly Elordi's, mind -- the only time we see real sex is as a voyeur from above, as two nameless servants (farm hands?) use a horse's bridle while having otherwise completely normal sex. The whole wretched moment is only barely glimpsed, and heard faintly, and it's so wildly unsatisfying that multiple people literally laughed out loud in our screening.

It's mystifying. Fennell has tackled much more transgressive stuff in her other work, approached familiar stories in unique ways, and subverted genre and form conventions all the while. But in this, her most overtly sexually-charged title so far, she fumbles in the sex of it all? What she's giving us isn't even good sex! It's the same issue I have with so much modern romantic fantasy novels, clearly written for middle class white women with a conservative upbringing, in that while they purport to be dirty and scintillating, what they actually describe in prose isn't even good sex so much as horny foreplay for readers with a fetish for frustration and problematic communication.

I'm probably harping on this breakdown of internal logic because Fennell herself seems to be aware of this problem. The film opens with what sounds like orgasmic breathing and rhythmic creaking before we're visually cued into the fact of the scene: a man being hanged publicly. It reminded me of the opening of Quills, and I just... if you know, you know, but that's my favorite film. Anyway, this moment primed me with optimism from the outset due to its explicit tying of sex with death and the complex ritual of violence as entertainment. Those are exactly the themes I'd like to see in a new version of Wuthering Heights, and it was clearly an option in Fennell's mind. She just chose to do the safest and silliest option instead.

Which is saying a lot when even that is at best a middling product on screen. The dialogue is as anachronistic as the costumes, the former being grating and the latter being at least interesting, which could have worked well. Given the modern pop music by Charli XCX, I wondered at times if we were about to lurch into a full Baz Luhrmann and have a ravey postmodern ball (a la The Great Gatsby). That would have been awesome. Alas, the whole thing gave me the strange sensation of being slowly submerged in water. The thing felt shadowy and bleak, strangely artless despite its artificially garish presentation, and even synth droning started to sound unfocused and hazy after a while. As if she knows she's lulling us into a stupor, Fennell takes pains to hammer us over the head with sensory information, less to keep us awake than to force us to Feel Things. What Things? Who knows? We're left adrift as waves of Intended Feelings crash into our eyes and ears, sent by a filmmaker whose boldness and ingenuity simply didn't synthesize with the material.