The gentle manner of Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship (lol)

Globe reports that 'Margot Robbie and Tom Ackerley Are ‘Feeling the Pressure’ to Make ‘Wuthering Heights’ Adaption a Hit'.

“Now Margot and Tom are also feeling the pressure around their next film, which they have fully produced through their company, their adaptation of Wuthering Heights that is coming out next year,” starring Margot and Jacob Elordi.

And sources say a lot is riding on that flick’s success.

“It’s hard to understate how important that one is to their future in Hollywood and their future as a couple,” says the source.

“Margot would be the first to tell you that there are no guarantees in show business, but they really have a lot riding on it.”

“But even with shooting mostly completed, it looks far from the surefire success that Barbie became.” (Mike Hammer)

A contributor to The Hindu wonders what Emily Brontë would think of the film.

I must admit, I’m a hard-to-please viewer, especially when it comes to celluloid adaptations of books I love. But the overt sexuality of the movie, as seen in the teaser trailer, doesn’t bother me. Sure, the overall aesthetic is closer to the Harlequin novel that first acquainted me with the rather unfortunate euphemism, “throbbing manhood”, rather than Heathcliff’s poetic: “Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” But then again, any piece of art is inherently polysemous, open to multiple interpretations. So, if Fennell saw it as a novel that evoked the “primal, sexual” feeling and is “packed full of S&M,” I won’t take offence.

I’d even argue that it isn’t completely unwarranted, especially if you discovered it in your teens, as most of us did. While Wuthering Heights is indeed an exquisitely structured Gothic novel that employs a double-frame narrative structure to enhance the storytelling experience with brilliantly etched characters, it takes a while, and multiple readings, to appreciate the novel’s craft. When I first read the book, in my broody, early teens, wholly sold on the idea that troublesome, forbidden men are the best sort, I must admit that I, too, felt it: that ceaseless yearning for sublime passion and love that transcended time, space and death.

Even the casting, while certainly not ideal — given that so much of who Heathcliff is and becomes hinges on his being the other (Romani, of African origin or even the son of an Indian or Arab lascar) — does not bother me that much. I do think it was a missed opportunity to add greater depth and layers to a complex character who never experiences the redemption arc so familiar in Victorian-era novels. But, from what I can gather, it appears to be a misguided attempt at colour-blind casting — Linton is being played by Shazad Latif and Nelly by Hong Chau — rather than blatant whitewashing. While I’m not personally a big fan of colour-blind casting in historical narratives like this, where identity significantly shapes a character’s experience and evolution, I am open to overlooking it.

And I’d completely ignore the brouhaha around Margot Robbie’s age, which‌ is just a function of ageism, in my opinion. If a 40-year-old Brad Pitt could have played Achilles, who was supposed to have been in his late teens when the Trojan war began, I think this, too, is okay.

The biggest problem with this version seems to be the same as with all Hollywood versions of the classic. While the stormy, self-destructive, obsessive (and somewhat incestuous) love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine, the primary protagonists, is compelling, the silver screen reduces the story to just that, doing an immense disservice to the text and the woman behind it.

Emily Brontë, described by the poet Ted Hughes as the “wildest of the three wild (Brontë) sisters”, loved animals, was painfully shy, perpetually sick, non-conforming, and rarely ventured beyond her beloved Haworth Moors. No record exists of her having any sort of love interest, though there are some whispers that she had an unusually close relationship with her brother, Branwell, who, like many of the male characters in Wuthering Heights, abused substances and struggled with his mental health.

By 30, one year after her novel came out to fairly negative reviews from pearl-clutching Victorian reviewers, ‌who described it as “a compound of vulgar depravity” and a book of “disgusting coarseness”, she was dead. But her novel has lived on, reincarnated in multiple cultural artefacts: films with actors like Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy playing Heathcliff; in the poetry of both Ted Hughes and his long-suffering wife, Sylvia Plath, who had picnicked together in Haworth; in a 1992 musical by Bernard J Taylor; and in the record-breaking 1978 single by Kate Bush.

I was inspired to reread the book last week after stumbling upon the trailer, and found myself still moved by the intense passion between the two central characters of the novel. But what also struck me this time were the existential questions she raises about the world she lived in, a world being shaped by colonisation, the slave trade, continuous warfare, women coming more into their own (the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of another exceptional Gothic novelist of the Victorian era, Mary Shelley, was one of the best-known early feminists) and the growth of the Industrial Revolution.

The genius of Wuthering Heights is that it also forces us to ponder our inherent tendency for categorical thinking and prejudice, the rigidity of social class and gender roles, the malleability of morality, the constant human battle between primitivism and civilisation and the mythology of free will: big ideas, especially given that the novel was written by a woman who, by all accounts, lived a relatively small life.

Wuthering Heights, however many times you read it, never stops being a fever dream, where landscape and people are feral, unhinged, primeval and oh-so-real, leaving you pondering the smallness of existence, the fragility of life, and the stupendous power of the human imagination. It is why I love it and return to it repeatedly, discovering something new every time.

This film version, on the other hand, from what little I could gather from the teaser (and the film may throw surprises), has whittled it down to a story of forbidden, hormone-fuelled teenage love, with mild sadomasochistic undertones: hardly original. If Emily, a quiet parson’s daughter living in Victorian England, could create a work of art so savage and enduring that she’s had a large part of the Internet still defending it, nearly two hundred years later, I can’t help feeling disappointed that Fennell, an innovative director who is notorious for taking risks and experimenting with complex, provocative themes, seems to have settled for so little. (Preeti Zachariah)

The Gauntlet discusses 'How the media’s obsession with smutty reads has ruined true literature and a generation of adaptations' (!!)

This remake, in which Brontë’s characters are sex-obsessed, erases the gentle manner of their relationship and takes attention away from Brontë’s main issues of class division and the mistreatment of coloured people such as Heathcliff, whom Catherine loves regardless of his appearance. It also does a disservice to the essence of period-drama love, which tends to be full of gentle manners, yearning and true affection without the need to be overtly sexual — something so well done in adaptations like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Emma.

As of now, from what we’ve seen in the trailer, Fennel’s focus on lust diminishes the gothic elements of Brontë’s novel, including themes of paranormal beings, the uncanny, the natural world and death. 

Don’t get me wrong, it can be an empowering form of media to make a period-drama piece focused on sexuality and pleasure, especially in a time when such topics are restrained and women are shamed for feeling natural desires. Yet, to adapt a classic novel that discusses real issues and make it all about sexual fantasies and pleasure is to erase the effort of the author, and to erase a message which urges readers to envision a more liberal society. 

The inaccuracies in Fennel’s upcoming Wuthering Heights make the film problematic for many reasons, to the point where it would not stand to even call this version of the story a true adaptation, unless Fennel is just rage-baiting fans of the original novel and hiding a more faithful adaptation, which seems unlikely. Many people have taken over Reddit to share theories of their own, the most popular amongst them being that the film will not actually follow the novel, but instead be a dream sequence from a modern-day woman, played by Margot Robbie, who’s reading the novel, self inserting herself into it and fantasizing about having a sexual relationship with Heathcliff. This theory — which suggests that the film isn’t an adaptation to begin with — might actually come off as a relief to many literature enthusiasts.

However, that doesn’t make it any better. 

We have normalized the sexualization of characters — many of whom are minors — to the point that we struggle to engage with films and books that lack sexual content. Accurate remake or not, the general obsession towards “spicy” media is pushing the world of literature backwards and negatively affecting young people. These erotic remakes of classics can be the early introduction to obscene media, leading to unhealthy attachments, and inappropriate, or hypersexual thoughts. 

Fennel reduces Brontë’s hard-earned triumph — for a novel that received criticism at its release for being unorthodox but is full of brilliant themes and literary devices — into a provocative money grab. It comes as a disappointment when Fennel could have made a truly Gothic film with striking cinematography, like 2024’s Nosferatu, or 2015’s Crimson Peak — both iconic films, with the former appropriately presenting sexuality to explore themes of violation, societal constraints, loss of control and shame. Unfortunately, 2026’s Wuthering Heights seems it will represent an unsettling and steadily growing vision of erasure and ignorance in the film industry in favour of “spicy” scenes and sensationalized imagery. (Sabahat Baig)

We won't take lessons from anyone who describes whatever Cathy and Heathcliff have as 'the gentle manner of their relationship' or wants period dramas 'to be full of gentle manners'. Wuthering Heights is not your kind of novel then.

The Harvard Crimson features a recent screening of the film Jane Austen a gâché ma vie followed by a panel discussion

During the discussion, [Tara Menon, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University] asked her fellow panelists about their thoughts on how the film's first frame evokes Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” [Sonia Hofkosh, Associate Professor and Chair of English at Tufts University] argued that this deliberate choice emphasizes the shared connection both Austen and Brontë have, who “have more in common” than expected. The interweaving of the two — despite Brontë’s distaste for Austen — highlights the long-running societal habit to group iconic female writers together. While they both wrote about romance, however, their styles and other thematic choices were quite distinct from each other. (Emma D.D. Pham-Tran)