Wuthering Heights (2026)
Directed by Emerald Fennell
Let me tell you what Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not: it is not an adaptation. This distinction matters, and Fennell — to her credit, or at least to her tactical advantage — has been unusually candid about it. What she has made, she’s essentially said, is a fan fiction. Her version of the story she wanted when she read Emily Brontë’s novel. And the moment you accept that framing, the film becomes legible, even defensible — a creature of a very specific cultural moment doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is that what it was designed to do turns out to be so much less interesting than what it pretends to be.
The opening credits tell you everything. Moaning sounds, ambiguous between ecstasy and anguish, arrive over darkness before a single image has been earned. It’s a declaration of intent — this film will scandalize you the way the novel scandalized its first readers in 1847 — but the analogy collapses almost immediately, because Brontë’s scandal was metaphysical and moral, while Fennell’s is purely cosmetic. The moaning, it turns out, belongs to a hanged man at a public execution, whose strangled exhalations produce a grotesque erection observed with wide eyes by the young Catherine Earnshaw and a bewildered nun. It’s a bravura entrance, genuinely strange, and for a few minutes you think this might be a film willing to sit inside its own discomfort. Then the moors appear — digitally immaculate, compositionally flawless, as inviting as a desktop wallpaper — and the discomfort dissolves into décor.
Margot Robbie plays Catherine. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff. The casting is so baldly aspirational that it becomes, paradoxically, a kind of honesty. These are two of the most photographed faces in contemporary cinema, and Fennell photographs them as such: in close-up, lit to eliminate shadow, framed for maximum virality. Robbie is thirty-five and luminously healthy, which makes her nervous adolescent caprices feel like performance rather than nature. Elordi is twenty-eight and so gentle-featured that when he repairs Catherine’s face from the rain instead of haunting her dreams and profaning her grave, you’re not surprised — you’re relieved, because nothing in him suggests the capacity for genuine cruelty. Brontë described Heathcliff as a man who would hang a dog without blinking. This Heathcliff would never do that. He’d feel bad about it afterward, which is worse.
The chemistry between the two actors is real enough during their quieter exchanges — there’s something genuine in the way they look at each other in the scenes built around proximity rather than passion — but the film keeps sabotaging their relationship with the very thing it’s selling: eroticism. When desire becomes explicitly visual, Fennell cuts to close-ups of bread dough being kneaded, of viscous egg yolks, of textures that signal sexuality the way a student film might. The peach in Call Me by Your Name was braver, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights was rawer by miles. Fennell strokes the material without ever committing to it, and the result is less fifty shades of passion than fifty shades of restraint dressed up in provocation.
What the film gets magnificently, unexpectedly right — and what rescues it from pure vanity — is Nelly Dean, played by Hong Chau with a coiled, watchful intelligence that outclasses everything around her. In Brontë’s novel, Nelly is the narrator, the housekeeper, the woman whose voice mediates everything we know about Wuthering Heights. She’s already unreliable in the novel — not because she lies exactly, but because she selects, omits, interprets. Her reasonableness is always slightly suspect. Fennell makes that suspicion into the film’s real subject. In this version, Nelly is the illegitimate daughter of Catherine’s father and a woman of Asian heritage — blood of the house, but never acknowledged as such. She’s subservient to a man who acquired power through money rather than birth, and who is granted social authority she will never share despite being the senior claim on the family line.
It’s a structural choice of genuine intelligence. By relocating the novel’s racial and social otherness from Heathcliff to Nelly — by making him ethnically similar to the landed class while still condemning him to serve them, and making her the intersection of every exclusion the world has available — Fennell creates a character who is simultaneously inside the story and outside it, with full information and no power. The whitewashing accusations leveled at Elordi’s casting before anyone had seen the film miss this entirely. Heathcliff’s skin color in this version doesn’t neutralize his marginalization; it clarifies it. Social class proves as brutal a mechanism of exclusion as ethnicity — he remains a stablehand, a subordinate, orbiting Catherine without ever escaping that orbit. And Nelly, carrying all the forms of exclusion at once, becomes the film’s true engine.
The brilliance of Chau’s performance is in what she doesn’t do. Nelly doesn’t rant, doesn’t confess, doesn’t even particularly reflect. She withholds — messages undelivered, information delayed just long enough to matter, the timing of news managed with surgical precision. When a dying Catherine asks her whether what happened between them was accident or intent, Nelly’s answer — hesitant, not quite absolved, something like “perhaps, I think so” — is the most devastating moment in the film. An unreliable narrator forced to narrate herself. A moral agent unmasked by the person she has managed into the grave.
This is the film Fennell could have made. Instead, she buries it.
The aesthetic is relentless and deliberate: Fennell wants the style to function like social media content, each image composed for maximum emotional impact at minimum duration, the visual equivalent of a story or a post. Edgar Linton’s mansion is furnished in anachronistic modernism, all sharp lines and deliberate wrongness, like a fashion editorial set in the past by someone who finds the past tedious. The color grading is totalizing — every frame pushed through the same filter, unified into a palette that renders the Yorkshire moors as illegible as a screensaver. Catherine’s costumes look like they were sourced from a recent runway rather than from any recognizable historical period, and the film seems to know this, even to celebrate it, the way Baz Luhrmann celebrated the anachronisms in his Great Gatsby without quite having the courage to fully commit to them.
Charli XCX wrote the score. You feel her presence throughout, not as intrusion but as declaration: this film is for now, for these audiences, for this cultural moment. That’s a legitimate artistic position. Pop anachronism can be a genuine mode of interpretation, not a failure of historical imagination but a choice to make old stories legible in new registers. The trouble is that Fennell’s approach to Brontë’s material isn’t really interpretation — it’s extraction. She takes the romantic premise, the two faces, the Yorkshire setting broadly construed, and the suggestion of doomed passion, and she builds around them a delivery mechanism for images that will perform well on the platforms where her audience lives. The novel doesn’t survive this process. Not because adaptations must be faithful — they mustn’t, and the best ones often aren’t — but because genuine transformation requires engaging with what you’re transforming.
The title appears onscreen as a curl of braided hair, a clear reference to Victorian mourning jewelry, one of the more beautiful moments of the opening. The film achieves this level of specificity only occasionally, and each time it does, you catch a glimpse of the more demanding movie it might have been. The quotation marks Fennell reportedly wanted around the film’s title — the finger-quotes you make when you know you’re about to say something your audience shouldn’t take too seriously — are honest about this limitation. She knew. She made it anyway.
Brontë’s novel has defeated better directors than Fennell. William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier remains the benchmark precisely because it understood that the Gothic dimension — the way Wuthering Heights makes weather into psychology, landscape into fate — required a sustained tonal commitment that the film medium resists. Buñuel tried in 1954 and got something interesting but not the thing. Arnold tried in 2011 and got the landscape right at the expense of almost everything else. No one has managed to film the novel’s second half, because the second half — Heathcliff’s revenge, his systematic destruction of everyone connected to his humiliation — requires a degree of concentrated malevolence that commercial cinema has no appetite for. Fennell doesn’t attempt it. She simply stops where the romance stops, as if the rest of the novel were an unfortunate misunderstanding on Brontë’s part.
What Fennell has made, finally, is a product of perfect market alignment that occasionally, in the character of Nelly Dean, forgets it’s supposed to be a product and becomes something more. Hong Chau’s face — precise, opaque, containing entire histories of accommodation and rage — suggests a film where the real story of desire and exclusion could have been told. But Fennell keeps returning to Robbie and Elordi in slow motion, to the ralentis and breathless cuts, to the machinery of contemporary romance on the big screen conceived in the image of the small one. The camera loves them too much to let them be interesting.
The moors, in Brontë, are not a setting. They are a moral and psychological condition — wild, ungoverned, indifferent to human longing. Fennell’s moors are gorgeous, but you could replicate them in any location with the right color grading and the right digital brushwork. Indistinguishable from other beautiful, remote, slightly threatening landscapes in contemporary prestige cinema. Inoffensive. Safe. Perfectly photographed for a world where the primary mode of experiencing landscape is the image of landscape rather than the thing itself.
The film will do well. Robbie and Elordi will be praised and beautiful on every platform that matters. Chau will receive a supporting actress mention in publications that pay attention to such things. The film will have the duration of an Instagram story in the sense that you will feel it fully while it lasts and forget it almost as immediately, the emotional residue evaporating in the time it takes to scroll to the next thing. And somewhere in Yorkshire, Brontë’s novel sits on shelves, doing what it always has — troubling the reader, refusing to comfort, insisting that the love it describes is not a dream but a damage, not eternal but lethal, not something to be desired so much as something to be survived.
Whether fourteen-year-olds come to read it after seeing this film is probably the best argument for the film’s existence. The novel can handle whatever the film sends its way.
