EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros/MRC theatrical release of Oscar winner Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights smooched $3M from Thursday previews at 3,000 locations.Before you comp the movie to the $7M previews for It Ends With Us (which opened to $50M), calm your jets. First that was a summer release. Second, distributione sources are seeing a big pop for moviegoing on Saturday, Valentine’s Day with a natural shift of foot traffic from last night to today, and into tomorrow. Let’s not forget the Monday Presidents Day holiday. The last time Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday was 11 years ago; that’s when Fifty Shades of Grey opened to $93M over 4-days with Kingsman: Secret Service in second place with $41M. I hear that there’s $14M in presales already for Wuthering Heights which is eyeing $40M-$50M over the 4-day holiday in North America. Reviews are fresh for Wuthering Heights, but at 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. It Ends With Us was 55% Rotten with critics, but 87% with moviegoers. As we told you, Warner Bros on the Jacob Elordi-Margot Robbie starring feature take of the Emily Brontë novel for $80M, over Netflix’s $150M. (Anthony D'Alessandro)
The Guardian also asks readers to share whether Wuthering Heights 2026 has 'inspired you to read Emily Brontë’s novel'. Esquire celebrates Wuthering Heights: '“Long Live Wuthering Heights”: Why We Are Still Hooked on Emily Brontë’s 1847 Classic'.Yet staff at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, have offered a stout defence of the film, calling it “amazing”, “exciting” and “fantastic”.“I loved it,” said Zoe, who works in housekeeping at the museum. “It made me quite emotional. I thought it was amazing.”“It really does feel like a fever dream,” said Mia, her colleague from digital engagement. “From the stunning costumes and sets to the dramatic soundtrack, it’s a great escape to the world of Wuthering Heights. The themes of the novel do shine through.”Ruth, a visitor experience coordinator, agreed that Fennell’s film – which was inspired by her experience reading the novel as a 14-year-old – captures “some essential truths to the book and the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy”.“I really enjoyed it,” she said, adding it made a refreshing alternative to previous adaptations, which include the 1939 version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, 1992’s take with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film.Many members of staff expressed the hope it would lead people back to the novel. “I think it will make a lot of viewers intrigued to read the book,” said Sam, from the museum’s programming department.Others did concede there had been “a lot of changes to the original novel”. “Some may not like [that]”, said Sue, from the learning wing, “but it’s an exciting film to watch in its own right.”“Is it faithful? No,” said outreach officer Diane. “Is it for purists? No. Is it an entertaining riff on the novel? Yes!” She also endorsed the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, despite Brontë’s novel describing him as “dark-skinned”. The actor was “fantastic”, she said, “and nailed the accent”.The staff watched the film at a preview screening on Thursday in Keighley organised by studio Warner Bros. “We weren’t involved in the making of the film at all,” said Rebecca Yorke, director of the museum and the Brontë Society.“But Emerald Fennell was a guest at our Brontë women’s writing festival in September where she spoke eloquently about Wuthering Heights and her personal response to it. Any new interpretation is likely to appeal to one audience more than another and spark lively debate.”Among those in the audience at the first public screening in Leeds on Friday morning was Brontë’s most recent biographer, Dr Claire O’Callaghan. “I enjoyed it,” she said. “Brilliant performances. There’s a lot of fun built into it, as well as the intensity and tragedy.”Fennell made it clear the film was her own spin on the story, which was “really refreshing”, said O’Callaghan. “There’s no attempt to have fidelity to the original. If it was more of a period drama then people might get more upset. But this is so far removed from that, and so over the top.”The Brontë Parsonage Museum is situated in the home in which Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote their groundbreaking novels, which was bought by industrialist Sir James Roberts in 1928 and donated to the Brontë Society. Emily died in the house aged 30 in 1848, the year after she published her first and only book, under the pen name Ellis Bell. [...]“We are expecting increased visitor numbers and have already a large increase in sales of Wuthering Heights,” said Yorke. “We have extended our opening hours and produced exclusive merchandise in response.” (Catherine Shoard)
I recall first reading Brontë’s novel at school, then again at university, and once more last summer while on holiday with my family (a good poolside read). I’m not sure how many times you have read the book – most adults have consumed it at least twice – but the contours are well-known. We are in Yorkshire, between the wind-battered outpost of Wuthering Heights and the comparatively lush Thrushcross Grange. The Earnshaws live at the former, while the wealthy Lintons move into the latter, setting up a toxic triangulation that will ruin the families for decades to come. Primarily, this story is about the passionate, cruel Catherine Earnshaw and the passionate, cruel adopted son Heathcliff, whose relationship drama is both hot and horrible. It was toxic before we started describing relationships as toxic.Brontë’s tale – her first and only novel – is not only a love story. It is also about generational trauma (so hot right now!), domestic violence (each chapter is newly gruesome), and yes, race (Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned”, and that has caused an unending discussion over his ethnicity). Like most Gothic novels, it is also ambiguous. You can read whatever you want into Brontë’s writing.It is fair to say that in Emerald Fennell’s take, which is out in all its quotation-marked glory today, that we get a big-time focus on the love. Margot Robbie brings an impressive degree of yearning to Catherine and Jacob Elordi provides goes all in on brooding for Heathcliff. Fennell, working with production designer Suzie Davies, brings a punchy look to this well-worn story, emphasising class divides and heightening the natural backdrop in a generally doomed manner. Charli XCX’s soundtrack, also out today, is a synthy ode to yearning.You might be wondering exactly why we needed another adaptation of Wuthering Heights. And the answer is: it’s in the public domain! You can do whatever the hell you want with it! According to IMDB, Brontë’s novel has inspired over 35 film and television adaptations. Does it feel like there have been… more? Maybe. But most adaptations bring new something new to our understanding and appreciation. Like Andrea Arnold’s 2011 interpretation, as raw in many ways to Fennell’s, which cast Black actors to play Heathcliff. Or the 2009 television series, which provided (a little) more breathing room for Brontë’s complications.Fennell, I suspect, would not want “Wuthering Heights” to become the definitive adaptation. Part of the fun of adaptations is that you get to pick and choose: you like that actor’s performance with this director’s vision in this project’s specific format. The only hard and fast rule is that there’s very little, to borrow another modern term, closure. And that’s why you keep coming back for more. Long Live Wuthering Heights (with or without those quotation marks). (Henry Wong)
In The Times, Dominic Sandbrook writes about Emily Brontë: 'Emily Brontë was a genius — but an odd one'.
For me, the most telling story about Emily concerns her relationship with her dog, Keeper, whom she supposedly adored. One day Keeper climbed on to the bed with muddy paws. Her reaction was to drag him downstairs and punch him repeatedly in the face until he was left “half-blind and stupefied”. No wonder Wuthering Heights is a dog lover’s nightmare. How, for example, does Heathcliff celebrate his elopement with the delicate Isabella Linton? By hanging her dog in front of her, naturally.Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Emily Brontë lived to a ripe old age, wrote dozens of books and died as one of the most fêted dog lovers in the land. [...]What to make of this strange, unhappy woman? Modern Brontë enthusiasts are very keen to diagnose her with anorexia or autism but this is surely carrying projection too far. The great biographer and critic Kathryn Hughes calls her “the patron saint of difficult women”. Dog lovers may take a more caustic view.In any case — and yes, contradicting my earlier assertion that nobody can know what she would have thought — it’s very hard to believe Emily Brontë would have been comfortable with a big-screen version of her only published book. For one thing, she was totally indifferent to what other people thought so it’s difficult to imagine her countenancing the changes film producers demand.More importantly, for all its brutality, claustrophobia and general brooding, Wuthering Heights is almost entirely lacking in the one thing Hollywood loves above all, which is sex. Given its author’s reclusiveness, that’s surely not surprising. But I find it extraordinary that so many people, including the director Emerald Fennell, consider it a sexy book. Perhaps they really, really hate dogs.
Susan Newby, learning officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England, said, “There is a sense that he is not white Anglo-Saxon, he’s something else, but you don’t know what that is.”Some scholars believe that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on the Liverpool slave trade. Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff from Liverpool, and Nelly, who narrates this part of the action, explains that Earnshaw saw Heathcliff starving and asked after his “owner.”It makes sense that Brontë would be interested in slavery. Her father, Patrick Brontë, was associated with the abolitionist politician William Wilberforce, who, according to the Parsonage Museum, helped pay for Patrick to study at Cambridge.Reginald Watson, an associate professor of literature at East Carolina University, has studied questions of Blackness in the works of the Brontës, including Emily’s sister Charlotte, the “Jane Eyre” author. “My belief is that because of the father’s involvement in abolitionism that both of the authors included connections to slavery in some form,” Watson said. His position is that while Heathcliff “may not be totally Black,” he is mixed.Another theory, however, is that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on prejudices against the Irish, since her father was from Ireland and she was writing at the start of the potato famine there. “Think about Heathcliff who was brought from Liverpool and speaks a sort of gibberish,” said Elsie Michie, a professor of English at Louisiana State University. “The description of Heathcliff conforms almost exactly to the caricatures of the Irish.”Michie added that the “dynamics of this novel are about otherness in various ways, and that otherness is in Heathcliff.”Onscreen, however, Heathcliff has largely been played by white actors, including Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and, perhaps most famously, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 version opposite Merle Oberon as Catherine. (Oberon actually was South Asian but hid that to ascend in Hollywood at the time.) A notable exception is Andrea Arnold’s 2012 adaptation, in which the adult Heathcliff was played by the Black actor James Howson. In an interview with NPR at the time, Arnold said, “In the book it was clear he wasn’t white-skinned. I felt that Emily was not committing exactly; she was playing with her own difference as a female.”Fennell’s version does away with references to Heathcliff’s race, instead largely focusing on his tortured romance with Cathy (Margot Robbie). Still, the cast doesn’t lack diversity entirely. Nelly is played by the Vietnamese American actress Hong Chau, and Shazad Latif, who is of Pakistani descent, plays Edgar Linton. [...]But while Newby, for instance, said she believes that Brontë presents Heathcliff as nonwhite, she also thinks the author leaves room for discussion. “She deliberately keeps it ambiguous,” Newby said.At the same time, Newby isn’t bothered by Elordi’s casting, in part because Fennell has been so explicit about the film being from her own perspective. The director makes a number of major changes, getting rid of some characters and altering details of Cathy and Heathcliff’s interactions. “Somehow I feel more bothered by some past adaptations that have very unquestionably, unthinkingly showed him as being white without ever really reading the book and thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s described,’” Newby said. “It was almost that was a default. You won’t be taken seriously as a lead if he’s not white.”The mystery is also part of the appeal of Heathcliff: We never do learn his origins before Earnshaw brings him into that household. (Esther Zuckerman)
There are, by my count, 18 different filmed adaptations of the book. More often than not, Heathcliff is played by a white actor – Richard Burton, Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes and countless others. It’s nearly impossible to accuse Fennell (who also cast the decidedly white roles of Linton and Nelly with actors of color) of whitewashing a story that’s been presented in that fashion for decades. There are exceptions, of course.In the 2011 film directed by Andrea Arnold, Heathcliff is portrayed by James Howson, a Black British actor. Howson was the first Black actor to play Heathcliff in a film, was plucked out of obscurity for the role, was paid about £8,000 for his work, and quickly went right back to obscurity. The movie was a box office failure and one can’t help but think that one of the main reasons to cast an actor like Jacob Elordi is to ensure enough star power to make back the production budget. Who am I to argue against the holy Saint Commerce?While I’m happy to accept Fennell’s rationale for casting based on her teenage imagination, I would likely go in the other direction if I were in her position. What did I imagine while reading Wuthering Heights at 14? Mostly battle scenes from Star Trek, while hoping my CliffsNotes version would arrive in the mail soon. Can I be criticized for wishing Heathcliff – a sour-faced weirdo whose sole goal in life is pitiless revenge against his foster family – wasn’t white or Black, but Optimus Prime from Transformers? I was 14. What the hell did I know about great literature? With a startling lack of spaceships or cars that turn into robots (and back again), what is an American boy supposed to relate to?But now I’m an adult with a fully developed brain, and I can see Wuthering Heights as a powerful story of class resentment, prejudice and the way those terrible forces curdle the human soul. It seeks to nod to the way in which we other those we don’t understand.Cathy and Heathcliff are kept apart because of his low social status – a status reinforced by Cathy’s brother Hindley forcing Heathcliff into life as a servant. That’s easy to accomplish because Heathcliff is explicitly different from the Earnshaws. Not just because he’s been adopted, but because he looks different. Even his backstory – his race and where he’s from originally – is a mystery that sets him apart from the other characters.One of the most defining characteristics of my own personal backstory is that I’m the product of a interracial marriage and was raised in America, a country where such things were illegal up until the middle of the 20th century. I can still remember the feeling when a grocery-store checkout clerk asked my dad if I was adopted. Interracial relationships and the biracial progeny of them are still a rarity in popular media. One of the most prominent examples is 2015’s Focus, which ironically stars Margot Robbie and Will Smith. It’s a solidly entertaining film, but one that doesn’t really engage with the social subtext of that pairing. Not that it has to.I’m not begging every movie with an interracial coupling to have something heady to say about it. If the charming conman plot of Focus stopped to preach to me about racial tolerance, it would be about as helpful as Transformers or the Starship Enterprise showing up in Wuthering Heights. But Focus wasn’t about those things. Wuthering Heights, in so many ways, is.If I had the ability to make Wuthering Heights as a movie, first of all, I’d probably respectfully decline. I still can’t shake the need to include robots. But if I did do it, I’d probably emphasize the aspects of the story that spoke to me the most – the alienation, the othering and the feeling that basic respect is just outside of my reach.The aspects of Wuthering Heights that spoke to Emerald Fennell the most are clearly kissing a hot guy that is sort of your brother. As is her right. But the one question I’d ask her is this: as a clearly intelligent and talented artist, why was she incapable of imagining a story with an interracial relationship? Maybe for the same reason I imagined Transformers stomping around on the moor. Because we see only what we want to see. (Dave Schilling)
The short answer to the question, “Is Heathcliff Jewish?” is an emphatic “No,” though that hasn’t stopped Emily Brontë scholars from suggesting that he is in fact Jewish, or at least that he has “Jewish roots.” That’s what Professor Sharon Lynne Joffe argues in a recent issue of Brontë Studies, the Journal of the Brontë Society, which was founded in 1893 and still going strong. Joffe writes that Brontë “incorporated nineteenth-century stereotypes of Jews into her character,” and that she “would have been familiar with these stereotypes through her reading of Blackwood’s Magazine.”Not so fast, professor. Joffe takes a leap of faith–not a logical step–and adds that “Heathcliff’s physical characteristics, his initial inability to speak English, his lineage, and his eventual success support my contention that Brontë used Jewish stereotypes to create Heathcliff.” Nothing in the novel itself supports the notion that he’s Jewish, though like Jewish characters in fiction and Old Testament figures like Jonah, he’s the Outsider. Of course, Jews aren’t the only literary outsiders.Nor does it help Professor Joffe’s case to summon Blackwoods to support her claims. My own reading of that magazine and others from the Victorian era, including Punch and Cornhill (I was conducting research for my book about British literature and the British Empire) taught me that editors, publishers and writers used racial stereotypes to describe anyone and nearly everyone on the planet, including the “wild” Irish. The word “wog, and the letters WOG, which stood for “Worthy Oriental Gentleman,” were used to describe the French, the Italians, the Indians from India and anyone with brown or black skin who didn’t speak proper English. Racism and anti-Semitism lurked at the heart of an empire where the sun supposedly never set.In the page of the novel, Heathcliff is called all kinds of names: “gipsy” (Roma in today’s lingo), “Afreet” (a dangerous figure in Islamic cultures) and a “Lascar” (a East Indian sailor who worked on English ships). But he’s never called a Jew, Jewish or Semitic. In chapter four, readers learn that Mr. Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, encounters “in the streets of Liverpool…a dirty, ragged black-haired child” who speaks “gibberish that nobody could understand.” Gender and ethnicity unknown. The child is initially referred to as an “it,” and neither masculine nor feminine. (Jonah Raskin)
When Sam Hirst teaches Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, they often find the students who end up hating it are the ones who go in expecting it to be a love story.“They come in thinking it’s a romance,” says Hirst, who lectures in English literature at the University of Liverpool and teaches courses at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. “And then they’re like, ‘This isn’t a romance, this is domestic abuse. This is a nightmare.’”Victorian critics agreed. Early reviews of Wuthering Heights found it disturbing and violent. In fact, the first known movie adaptation—a (now lost) 1920 silent film—advertised itself as “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate.” So why do so many modern readers expect it to be a romance?“You really see a change in the way in which Wuthering Heights is understood with the release of the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon,” Hirst says. This film adaptation cut out the second half of the book, downplayed the violence committed by Olivier’s character, Heathcliff, and played up the romance between Heathcliff and Oberon’s character, Cathy.Since then, there have been several feature film adaptations of Wuthering Heights, including the 1954 Mexican film Abismos de Pasión, the 1966 Bollywood musical Dil Diya Dard Liya, the 1970 British adaptation starring Timothy Dalton, the 1985 French film Hurlevent, and the 2011 movie by Andrea Arnold. Like the 1939 film, all five of these movies adapt the first part of the novel by focusing on Cathy and Heathcliff’s romantic (if destructive) feelings for each other, while excluding the second half of the novel in which Heathcliff exhibits some of his worst behavior. [...]For the reader, Heathcliff’s horrific actions raise questions about the nature of his supposed love for the deceased Cathy.“I mean, he abducts the daughter of the woman he’s said to love, and forces her to marry somebody,” says Claire O’Callaghan, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University and author of Emily Brontë Reappraised. “His bad behavior is not only because she chose somebody else, but because of the things he chooses to do as well.”The highly acclaimed 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights doesn’t include any of Heathcliff’s actions toward the children, because it doesn’t include the children at all. Instead, it ends by fast-forwarding from Cathy’s death to Heathcliff’s death many years later, and then showing the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff happily walking together on the West Yorkshire moors. The 1954, 1970, and 2011 adaptations only include Hareton (“Jorge,” in the Mexican version) as a young child, and don’t portray Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.Eliminating the second generation of characters and Heathcliff’s treatment of them “allows you to ignore that who he is persecuting are the innocent,” Hirst says. “You can’t think of it as a love story if you actually honestly portray that part of the story,” because “what his love actually looks like is this horrifying toxic nightmare of a thing.”Early media coverage of Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation has noted the film’s deviations from the novel, including Cathy’s age (Robbie is 35 whereas in the novel her character dies before 20); the casting of Elordi as Heathcliff, whose racial and ethnic identity in the book is ambiguous (characters frequently describe him using a slur for Romani people); and the film’s ahistorical costumes and sets.Additionally, the new movie does not tell the second-generation characters’ stories following Cathy’s death and, in fact, overwrites some of their existence. In Fennell’s version, Cathy’s brother is dead by the time her father brings home a selectively mute boy, whom Cathy chooses to name Heathcliff after her deceased brother. The new film also doesn’t include Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.All of which makes sense. It’s hard to spin a film as a Valentine’s Day movie if the romantic hero kidnaps the heroine’s daughter. (Becky Little)
Fennell doesn't portray this behavior as coming out of nowhere; Nelly's actions appear to be driven by her long-held bitterness at having been cast off as Cathy's closest friend as soon as Heathcliff entered the picture. As far as grudges go, this one runs dangerously deep.Fennell's Heathcliff, on the other hand, is stripped of the majority of his villainy. Not only is there no next-gen of children for him to torture, but rather than a battered wife, Isabella (played by Alison Oliver) is presented as a seemingly willing participant in his sadomasochism. Introduced as Edgar's gleefully unhinged ward rather than his sister, Isabella enters into what appears to be a consensual dominant-submissive marriage with Heathcliff in which she gets off on his mistreatment of her. Heathcliff's greatest crime in Fennell's version? Loving Catherine with uncontrollably reckless abandon.As far as true evil goes, that's not much of a crime at all. Manslaughter by neglect, on the other hand? Pretty unforgivable. (Megan McCluskey)
“When [Fennell] sent me the script I could see this wasn't going to be your average movie,” Davies tells ELLE Decor, and she was immediately all in. The enthusiasm was mutual and infectious. Davies describes Fennell as having that quality of making the impossible seem not just doable but necessary. Before long, Davies was building composite sets across three soundstages where a horse and carriage could ride up a long drive into Wuthering Heights's farmyard, where horses could be stabled and tea could be brewed in a kitchen, and where actors could climb the stairs to bed. She wrapped all of it in 360-degree high-resolution photographs of Yorkshire landscapes to complete the illusion.The scale was staggering. Four weeks of drawings, as Davies made hand scribbles on an iPad before passing them to art directors who then transformed them into proper architectural plans. Then ten weeks of construction, turning empty soundstages into fully operational 19th-century estates complete with livestock and fires burning in hearths. They did spend two weeks in Yorkshire—in Wreath Valley, walking for hours across the moors in November with just Davies, Fennell, cinematographer Linus Sandgren and the location manager hunting for the perfect cliffs and ruins.Every time they’d scouted, the weather cooperated beautifully: foggy, windswept, moody—everything you'd want for Wuthering Heights. Naturally, when they arrived to shoot, they got crystalline sunshine and had to manufacture the atmosphere with special effects like smoke. But that felt appropriate as part of the project's larger ambition to exist in what Davies calls “that slither between realism and unrealism,” where you can't quite tell if you're looking at Yorkshire or a soundstage recreation of Yorkshire, where the artificial and the authentic blur together into something more heightened than either individual space.“When Cathy sees Heathcliff in those ruins, I don't think you know if you're on the sound stage or if you're in the real Yorkshire Moors, and I love that ambiguity,” Davies says.The design is governed by a philosophy Davies attributes to working with Fennell: “There's no such thing as less is more; more is more.” Every choice is turned up, dialed past restraint into something more operatic.At Wuthering Heights itself, the architecture makes an argument about belonging. The kitchen ceiling measures six feet four inches, but Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff, stands six feet five inches tall. He cannot stand up straight in the house he eventually owns, and can never fully inhabit it. “So it doesn't belong to him. He's never going to fit in that property,” Davies explains. [...]At Thrushcross Grange, the Linton family's estate, that “more is more” philosophy manifests as gilded captivity. “Everything is caged, even the garden is caged,” Davies says. The estate presents itself as paradise—Technicolor excess, marble staircases, rooms that explode with color and ornament—but every beautiful detail reinforces the same message: you cannot leave. Goldfish swim in transparent urns, their beauty entirely contingent on confinement (they could only use real fish for a single day of shooting—they had their own call sheet, required specific water temperatures, and then were replaced with mechanical doubles).But it's Cathy's bedroom at Thrushcross Grange that becomes the film's most visceral expression of entrapment. Davies keeps a swatch of latex on her desk—skin-toned, tactile, and leftover from Saltburn where she'd used it for a privacy screen. When she read Fennell's stage directions for a room where the walls should feel like skin, that latex was sitting right there. She discovered, almost by accident, that stretched latex becomes translucent. So she asked Margot Robbie, who plays Cathy, to photograph her arms in high resolution—veins, freckles, texture, and all. Davies's graphics department manipulated the images, intensified the veins, experimented with latex colors, and printed Robbie's skin behind stretched, padded panels.The room itself is deliberately sparse—a bed, a dressing table, a mirror, and nothing else. The beds sit slightly too low and the proportions feel wrong. “It brings more unease because there’s something not right about the room,” Davies says. There is nowhere to look except those walls, and no distraction from the fact that you’re enclosed by something living, that breathes and watches.The color story operates in clear emotional registers: at Wuthering Heights, everything is black, white, or neutral. Thrushcross Grange explodes in Technicolor and red—the only color Cathy is allowed to wear, threaded through the film like a visual motif of passion and danger. Davies and Fennell, who both describe themselves as magpies when it comes to visual references, pulled elements from everywhere: a staircase from Chatsworth House, a brutalist fireplace from a contemporary building, and even an abandoned mine in Wales.All of it coheres into spaces that feel less like sets and more like fever dreams made physical. Davies wanted the entire film to work this way, engaging every sense. “We want the audience to smell it, touch it, taste it, feel it,” she says. In the end, that's what Wuthering Heights delivers: two prisons, both inescapable—one where Heathcliff can never belong, and another where Cathy is wrapped in beauty that suffocates. (Julia Cancilla)
Both of these characters are messy. They're destructive. They're unapologetic. They put female desire first, which I think is going to piss some people off, but I loved that about them. It would be easy to say that their entire identities are wrapped up in romantic obsession. But talk about how important it was to show that female desire, that all consuming desire, and the choices that these women make for themselves?Margot Robbie: Do you know what felt radical? We have a scene — Alison and I — on the swing in the garden, and it's a scene essentially, where we're just fight over Heathcliff, and it felt so radical to do a scene like that. The ironic thing is that we've fought so hard to not have to do that in movies anymore, but now it's been so long since — I don't know if I've done a scene like this since I was on the soap opera I was on back in Australia when I was a teenager. It felt so radical to just be two women fighting over a man. It was crazy. “You have him. He's so handsome. Who you talking about? You could never take him!” It was weirdly exciting to do.Alison Oliver: Yeah, it was strange. All of these characters do have — I feel like Emerald really gave them agency in their own ways as well, which within the sort of confines or the period, you do feel like they have agency in some sense. And I think that was important to show.Absolutely. They have depth and agency.MR: Yeah, they all make the choices. And then everything you see in the movie happens because of the choices they make. Whereas usually, even now, when we're not doing scenes fighting about men, most of the time, you're usually playing a character that something happens to, and then you watch a movie about the effects of that thing happening to that female character.AO: They are the decider.MR: For both of our characters, I feel like we make a choice, we do a thing, and it's not the right thing in most instances, and then we have to deal with the consequences.OK, Margot, this does not work unless you and Jacob have the most insane chemistry we've ever seen on screen. And you did. I'm always fighting to bring back chemistry, and you guys did it.MR: Yes! Chemistry and charisma are two things that I'm like, why can't we have that? That's what I want in the movies. Charismatic characters or I want insane chemistry,Was there a moment where you and Jacob were like, Oh, we got it?MR: There were a couple of moments. Even on day one. [We shot] the first scene in the movie where Cathy flings open the bed hangings, and [Heathcliff is] lying in bed. And then we ended up cutting this bit but I walked up over him, and then crouch down and got like this close to his face and told him to, “get up, we've got neighbors,” or whatever it was. And we cut that bit because the proximity is something we wanted to save. But, I mean, that was day one, and even then, everyone was kind of like, “Whoa.” And we were like, “Okay, I think this movie's gonna work.” Also just because she's throwing something at him, and he's throwing it back, and he's like, “What?” There was already an intensity between them that I think we could build on from that point. (Kathleen Newman-Bremang)
Fennell’s Heathcliff is whiteBrontë’s “Wuthering Heights” leaves Heathcliff’s racial identity ambiguous, with characters referring to him as a “gipsy brat,” “lascar” and “Spanish castaway” at different points throughout the novel. But one thing is clear: He is not white.As the Lousiana State Unversity professor Elsie Michie writes in the academic journal article, “From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference,” Heathcliff’s racial othering is how “he becomes, for others, a locus of both fear and desire.” In other words, Heathcliff’s role in the novel, and thus his fraught romance with Cathy, is predicated upon his non-white identity.Fennell’s film instead relies on class differences — and a meddling Nelly (to be discussed later) — to form the rift between its love interests.Cathy’s brother dies youngWhen Mr. Earnshaw presents a young Cathy with her companion-to-be early in the film, she declares that she will name him Heathcliff, “after my dead brother.”For the remainder of the film, Brontë’s character Hindley Earnshaw is subsumed into Mr. Earnshaw. Rather than Hindley, it is Mr. Earnshaw who devolves into the drunk gambling addict whose vices force him to cede Wuthering Heights to Heathcliff. Mr. Earnshaw’s abuse of young Heathcliff in the film makes the latter’s revenge plot more personal than his book counterpart’s against Hindley.Cathy meets Edgar Linton as an adultIn Brontë’s novel, Cathy and Heathcliff first encounter their neighbors, the Lintons, after an outdoor escapade gone awry. Cathy gets bitten in the ankle by an aggressive dog and stays at the Lintons’ for a few weeks to heal.Cathy sustains a similar injury in the film, but this time, she’s an adult woman, who falls from the Thrushcross Grange garden wall after attempting to spy on its grown residents Edgar and Isabella. (In the book, the two are siblings. Here, Isabella is referred to as Edgar’s “ward.”)Aside from providing some comic relief, Fennell’s revision also fast-tracks the marriage plot that severs Cathy and Heathcliff.Nelly is a meddler, and a spiteful oneWhereas Brontë writes Nelly as a largely passive narrator, Fennell abandons the frame narrative structure altogether and instead fashions the housekeeper into a complex character with significant control over Cathy’s life.It is she who ensures Heathcliff overhears Cathy as she laments how marrying him would degrade her, causing him to flee Wuthering Heights and leave Cathy to marry Edgar. Nelly’s ploy comes shortly after Cathy demeans the housekeeper, claiming that she wouldn’t understand Cathy’s predicament given she’s never loved anyone, and no one has ever loved her. Thus, Nelly is characterized as vengeful toward Cathy — although, as the latter lies in her death bed, the two share a brief moment that complicates their relationship to each other.Regardless, Fennell gives Nelly and Cathy’s relationship psychological depth that Brontë’s novel doesn’t seem to afford them.Cathy and Heathcliff have sex (and a lot of it)Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff never explicitly (in the text) consummate their professed undying love, save for a few kisses just before Cathy breathes her last.Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” on the other hand, grants them an entire Bridgerton-style sex montage — they even get hot and heavy in a carriage. It’s nearly impossible to keep count of the “I love you”s exchanged during the pair’s rendezvous.These smutty sequences certainly validate the Valentine’s Eve release.Isabella is a willing submissiveOne particular still of Alison Oliver’s Isabella is already making the rounds online, and for good reason. The shot, which depicts the young woman engaging in BDSM-style puppy play, is a stark contrast to Brontë’s characterization of Isabella as a victim of domestic violence.In Brontë’s book, Isabella marries Heathcliff naively believing he might shape up into a gentleman and flees with their son when she realizes that is out of the question. In the film, Heathcliff is clear from their first romantic encounter that he does not love Isabella, will never love her and pursues her only to torture Cathy — and the young woman still chooses to be with him.There is no second generationPerhaps Fennell’s most glaring diversion from her source material is her complete omission of the second half of Brontë’s novel, which centers on a second generation comprised of Cathy and Edgar’s daughter Catherine Linton, Heathcliff and Isabella’s son Linton Heathcliff and Hindley and his wife Frances’ son Hareton Earnshaw.In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “Wuthering Heights,” Brontë scholar Pauline Nestor writes that many literary critics interpret the novel’s latter half as “signifying the restoration of order and balance in the second generation after the excesses and disruption of the first generation,” while others contend the violence that stains Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship is bound to be replicated by their children. Either way, the structure of Brontë’s novel encourages readers to interpret each half through the lens of the other.Fennell’s film instead ends where Brontë’s first act closes, hyper-focused on Cathy and Heathcliff. In the same way the doomed lovers see each other, Fennell figures them as the center of the world. (Malia Mendez)
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