Box-Office Doubts, Vagina Hair, Hands, Irish roots and plenty more

The early box office performance of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights has generated starkly different interpretations across major entertainment outlets:

Men's Journal or the New York Post appear to focus on the film's competitive position—it's still winning the weekend—and perhaps view the numbers in isolation rather than against projections:

“Wuthering Heights” dominated the box office on its opening weekend, with gross sales hitting $11 million, according to The Numbers (  Friday, February 13 ; Domestic (42%) $11,000,000 in 3682 theaters. International: (58%): $15.200.000. Total: $26.000.200 BoxOffice Mojo).

But The Hollywood Reporter and World of Reel compare Wuthering Heights to industry tracking, studio expectations, and the film's massive budget requirements. From this perspective, even leading the weekend represents a disappointment:

Things are not looking too good for Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” at least when compared to the $50M opening that seemed practically locked just a few days ago.

Fennell’s divisive romance tallied $8M on Friday — not good. Warner Bros. is praying that an onslaught of ticket buyers will show up today for Valentine’s Day. Otherwise, the film is currently looking at $37–$38M for the four-day weekend. (Jordan Ruimy)

Variety offers an extensive look at the film's creative process through an interview with hair and makeup department head Sian Miller and with production designer Suzie Davis:

Over the course of the movie, she had two looks for the actor: “It was ‘Jesus Elordi’ and ‘Darcy Elordi’ as Emerald and I mockingly called it,” she says about Heathcliff’s eventual transformation into a clean-shaven gentleman. “Reading the script, [the long-haired look] really rang out. I had the pleasure of knowing Jacob before [from ‘Saltburn’]; I asked him, ‘Can you just grow everything?” (...)

As detailed as Fennell’s script was, the “Vagina hair” was not written in. But having worked with Fennell on “Saltburn,” Miller says, “There were talks of vagina early on,” so she wasn’t shocked when the conversation came up.

Miller worked closely with production designer Suzie Davies, who said, “‘When we get back to Wuthering Heights, there’s going to be this big fissure in the wall where the house is falling apart, and it’s a vagina.'” In another scene, Isabella is given a gift for Christmas, and it’s a pop-up book; metaphorically, it resembles a vagina.

Miller followed suit: “I’d seen something reminiscent of this style in my search — this plait at the back of the head. I thought, ‘If I make it smaller and we dress the hair around it.’ We just called it a ‘Vagina plait.’ That’s what’s great about working with Emerald, you show her things, ‘Oh, vagina plait. Yes, I love that.’ And we gave the hairstyles names. We really spur each other on.” (Jazz Tangcay)

Miller also explains the significance of freckles (representing exposure to the moors), the "doll braids" for Catherine's transformation at Thrushcross Grange, and the disturbing death scene where Robbie didn't wash her hair to emphasize Catherine's deterioration from sepsis poisoning.

Wuthering Heights, which is in Yorkshire, needed a stable, an upstairs and a kitchen. Even though Davies built it on a soundstage, nature still needed to be ever-present.

“That’s why we have a courtyard of rock around the house,” Davies explains. In addition, the arch leading to the house was inspired by Gothic architecture.

Davies raised the set by two feet so she could build a drainage system. “We wanted practical effects. So there are rain rigs punched through the ceiling and there’s a tank underneath.”

She kept the colors of the Wuthering Heights interiors muted and almost bruise-like.

The idea of Wuthering Heights was for it to feel bruised and heavy with a brutalist vibe.

During her research, Davies found the Trefor granite quarry in Northern Wales, which was abandoned and near a “big brutal structure on top of a hill.” Davies says, “It’s got nothing to do with Yorkshire, but it has the essence that Emerald wanted. Once we found that, then we started sort of layering on elements of the Yorkshire vernacular, of those big tiles.” The tiles were wet and shiny. She goes on to say, “There are a lots of modern materials used in traditional ways, and traditional materials used in unconventional ways. Everything’s flipped on its side, just to make the audience feel more uncomfortable.” (...)

When Cathy is introduced to her bedroom, it’s boasted that the walls are like her skin.

Again, it’s an uncomfortable moment for the character. (...)

Once she knew she was onto something, Davies asked Robbie to “send high res images of her arms and veins. We printed it. We’ve slightly accentuated her veins.” Davies adds, “We had a go at doing her belly button as well above the fireplace, but that looked a little bit too weird, believe it or not.” The images of her skin were then printed onto the fabric that’s used for the padded wall panels of the bedroom.

Davies adds that at the end, as there’s an overhead shot of Cathy on the bed as she is dying, her veins are prominent. “We printed her veins and everything into the carpet as well, just for that top shot, which is even more weird and uncomfortable.” (...)

Take a careful look at “Wuthering Heights” and hands are everywhere, whether it’s shots of the actors, or as part of the decor. “There’s something really sexy about what they’re up to and what’s going on,” Davies says.

For the hands above the fireplace, Davies says she took casts of the art department’s hands to make the ceiling roses in the fireplace and in the panels of the library. (...)

The dollhouse was created by the Mattes and Miniatures crew. They built a 1/12th scale version of the Grange. Davies had the model built first, before building and designing the lifesize Thrushcross Grange, flipping her typical design process. (Jazz Tangcay)

Elle analyzes Jacqueline Durran's costumes for the film:

When viewers meet Margot Robbie’s Cathy Earnshaw, who wears a palette grounded in ruby and burgundy, she aggressively cuts through the crumbling gray-brown farm home and its surrounding hills. Her wardrobe consists of modern-cut corsets with intricate embroidery, girlish checked skirts, and peplum waistcoats. They’re clothes that burn too bright to be period-precise—and that’s the point. Far from prim and proper, the pieces are as carnal as her lust for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). As Cathy’s pulled into the wealthy Linton household, and away from Heathcliff, the styling further amplifies, now as a rebellion against the societal expectations she finds herself boxed into. (...)

On the surface, costumes are there to support character arcs and development. But Wuthering Heights is a story of trauma and mania (and the Saltburn director’s signature emotion: horniness); a faithful Georgian wardrobe would be too polite and restrained. What takes the Wuthering Heights costumes levels beyond the adaptation baseline is the brazen modernity Durran injects to create a rule-breaking wardrobe fitting of a transgressive (at least for the time period) anti-heroine. A black leather corset with red heart cutouts inspires initial provocation in a scene intended to get pulses racing, and that sets off the downward trajectory of events. (...)

In a conventional period film, these inaccuracies might take viewers out of the experience. Here, the exaggerated clothes match the augmented magnitude of Cathy’s discontent, always on the verge of reaching a boiling point and overflowing into impropriety. (Irina Grechko)

The Irish Times interviews Alison Olvier, Isabella in the film. The Wrap explores 7 more Wuthering Heights adaptations available for streaming. The Stony Brook Press again repeats the arguments about casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff being whitewashing the character, arguing this represents a "colorblind approach" that erases important themes of racial prejudice from the story. Daily Mail informs that "fans break down in tears over heart-wrenching film's sad storyline as stunned viewers say they 'cried their eyes out'".

The Sunday Times wonders, after reading some of the reviews, what's the fun in a decorous version of the novel, without the lust and the cruelty:

I read the reviews of this film in confusion. I looked at the Tomatometer — just 64 per cent — and wondered, what is it that people want? Do they just want blandness in films now? Predictable storylines?

It’s true, a decorous adaptation wouldn’t have Heathcliff heaving over Cathy, rasping, “You bitch.” It wouldn’t have her dad screaming, “F*** off, you silly woman.” It wouldn’t have a public hanging scene in which a child yelps of the corpse, “He’s got a stiffy!” (complete with close-up). It wouldn’t have the prostitutes, the blood, the squelching, the snail trails, the erotic eggs or Cathy running about the moors in ever more teetering (mouthwatering) bits of couture. But who’d prefer that adaptation over this? Bourgeois is boring.

There is a problem in culture at the moment of making everything predictable and small. Real art now scares us. As film dies, it’s being shut into ever more boring, ugly little formulas just to make money. It’s true (as this film shows) phone-obsessed audiences can’t even cope with subplots. The soundtrack isn’t a soundtrack any more; it’s a marketing opportunity. I get why people react against that. But why don’t they embrace the rest of it? Why don’t they see this for what it is — spectacular? Or do they think that the Brontës were just weeping, sad, limited victims — as that review points out, virgins — deserving only of insipid, careful remakes? And the less we see of posh “primal” Emerald’s sexuality, the better? (Camilla Long)

And more Sunday Times. Here, they explore the Irish roots of the novel:

 Any driver travelling the Belfast–Dublin road will pass a brown tourism sign pointing to the Brontë Homeland. Few turn off, and fewer still realise that behind that modest roadside marker lies a literary debate that has simmered for more than a century.

The Brontës belong to Yorkshire. Yet, a generation before Haworth, before the parsonage and the wind-scoured heath, there were the fields of rural Co Down.

More than 100 years ago, a Belfast writer argued, to scoffing in some quarters, that the family’s literary story began in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains, and that the backdrop inspired more than has ever been comfortably acknowledged.

The writing trio are, says the Irish novelist Martina Devlin, “regarded as jewels in the English literary crown and quite rightly so”. But, she adds, “many rivers feed into the great ocean of creativity, and one of those rivers is the Irish dimension”. (...)

It was the Belfast writer William Wright who, in The Brontës in Ireland, first argued in print in 1893 that the Co Down factor should be treated as much more than a biographical footnote.

Drawing on local testimony among Patrick’s contemporaries, Wright suggested that his upbringing, surrounded by the Mournes, left traces in the imaginative world later fixed in Yorkshire.

Wright floated the idea that Heathcliff, the feral, obsessive foundling of ambiguous background at the centre of Wuthering Heights, might represent the Irish famine-era migration or Irish “otherness” entering England en masse at Liverpool at the time, the city in which he is discovered wandering the streets. (...)

Dr Robert Logan, of the Brontë Ireland society, believes Patrick’s influence has been consistently under-recognised. (...)

Brontë Ireland, he notes, remains affiliated with the Brontë Society in Haworth and maintains close ties.

“There’s always been a close connection,” he says.

The aim, he suggests, is not to redraw the map of literary ownership, but to ensure the opening chapter is more widely known and never forgotten.

Devlin agrees, saying: “It doesn’t detract from the Brontës, it adds to our understanding.” (Jason Johnson)

Forbes explores where Wuthering Heights was filmed and how to visit. People compares the Wuthering Heights 2026 cast side-by-side with the "original" 1939 Stars. The Telegraph explains that the 'shocking' first scene of the film was scaled down after the first previews. Who knows? The Everygirl ranks all the songs of Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album. Their best? Dying for you. Vermilion County First briefly reviews the album:

This project marks a pivotal shift for Charli XCX, signaling her transition into a more cinematic and experimental era. By revisiting one of literature’s most intense stories, she joins a broader conversation about how classic themes of obsession and volatility can be reinterpreted for a modern audience. The result is a body of work that feels both ancient and futuristic, solidifying her place as one of pop’s most versatile voices. (Mariana A.)

The Record-Patriot publishes an audio review of the album. By the way, a new song has been released on video: Always Everywhere. 

Bloomberg considers the film an example of the power of unoriginal art. InStyle explains how "really" people dressed in Georgian times.