Wuthering Heights initially baffled readers who dismissed it as “a strange book”.Earlier readers found it was “wild” and “confused”, portraying a “semi-savage love”. Yet, in 1850, the poet and critic Sydney Dobell recognised its originality and power, praising the novel’s distinctly poetic quality. To Dobell, “the thinking out” of many of the passages was “the masterpiece of a poet, rather than the hybrid creation of a novelist”.Fittingly, before Heathcliff and Cathy haunted the moors, Emily Brontë was crafting her magic in verse preoccupied with death, steeped in grief and brimming with elemental passion and the spectral. Such motifs form the beating heart and singular atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, but without her gothic poetry, her beloved novel may not have existed. And, while this novel defines her reputation today, in her lifetime she was first and foremost a poet.Among all her poems, Remembrance (1845) stands out as a direct ancestor of Wuthering Heights. The speaker mourns a lover lost for “15 wild Decembers”. It is full of imagery of frozen graves and icy bodies “cold in the earth” foreshadowing Cathy’s burial. The snow also anticipates the wintry desolation that frames Wuthering Heights. (Read more)
She is also the main guest on ABC's Radio National Program discussing "Are the withering reviews for Wuthering Heights justified?"
That is the emotional truth that Fennell captures. Not the literalness of the novel, but the intensity of its impact, the mark it leaves on the reader.Many will consider this adaptation provocative. But that provocation is nothing more than the honest expression of an age in which everything is discovered for the first time, when reading was also discovering who we were.Because every book has its own life and is reborn differently in each reader.This Wuthering Heights doesn’t attempt to reproduce the novel, but rather to recapture the emotion of that first encounter. To liberate adolescent memories and merge them with the sensibilities of another era. It will appeal more to young people than to adults, who don’t compare the film to the novel because they understand and believe they are different languages.An author doesn’t judge their creations; they create them and endow them with specific characteristics that serve to tell a story in a world they create around them, a world that readers then interpret and give life to as they wish.The need to love and be loved remains intact. The vertigo of desire. The abyssal feeling of helplessness in the face of unrequited love that rots all that is beautiful. The fragility of everything that seems eternal.This film is, at its core, an invitation to return to the unrepeatable moment when a book first transformed us.Emerald Fennell seems to be saying that love has taken so many turns, rebelled so many times, and explored so many paths since its inception, and yet it remains at the same starting point: that of eternal aspiration. Because genuine love, at any age, is always adolescent. (Winston Manrique Sabogal and Robert Lienhard)
As previously mentioned, his race plays a vital role in the text, as it is the basis of his mistreatment and neglect by the other white British characters. But Fennell chooses to take an alternative approach when asked about her casting choice; she deflects, stating, “I was sort of focusing on the kind of Sado-Masochistic elements of it”. As a white British filmmaker, Fennell’s inattentiveness to depict race relations on screen is certainly not out of the ordinary. But it does somewhat reignite long-held stereotypes concerning men of colour in the media. Her white-washed male lead and hypersexualised iteration of the text lend themselves to a critical race reading. In which, arguably, the only way Fennell could comprehend and communicate a sense of attraction to a character, who is used to represent racial othering in Victorian society, is to strip him of his noticeable ethnic features and to emphasise his sexuality through the strikingly modern lens of BDSM. (Hazelle Arkhurst)
Wuthering Heights is not a novel about how desire is negotiated within the social order; for that, there’s Jane Austen, for that, there’s Charlotte Brontë. It’s a novel about what civilization cannot contain. Emily Brontë is the writer of what cannot be contained. She writes from outside of everything, without precedent, without a line you can draw back. Cinema has translated that intensity into the language of sex. And in that translation, the intensity is lost. Because Emily Brontë, who died at 30, probably without having known sex, knew something that Fennell dismisses: that imagination is more powerful than experience, that the most disturbing ferocity is the one that doesn’t pass through the body. If she had lived 20 years longer, the history of the European novel would be different. No blockbuster can capture her, and Fennell’s quotation marks, at least, have the honesty to admit it. (Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán)
Because even many exteriors were created on stages, Sandgren and Fennell had extreme control over their palette; the result is some of the most striking color imagery since the glory days of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose studio-bound flights of fancy like “Black Narcissus” and “A Matter of Life and Death” were key reference points for Fennell. “When heartbreak occurs, the sky can be blood red,” Fennell said, adding that Thrushcross, the estate Cathy (Margot Robbie) moves to in the middle of the film, exists in a state of everlasting spring. “Except when it’s Christmas — then it always snows.” (...)“Film is an organic format,” Sandgren said. “If you have a digital camera and the camera is still, and there’s a wall, then it’s actually a still image, and it’s not moving. But film moves, and that automatically helps with the suspension of disbelief. It also really helps with the richness of the colors and the skin tones. It’s much more emotional.” Although Sandgren and Fennell leaned into the grain for most shots, for wide shots, they used the higher resolution VistaVision so that the viewer’s eye could go to small figures in the frame without being distracted by grain that was nearly as large as the actors. (...)“It could have been a 1.33 movie, and it could have been a 2.40 movie,” Sandgren said, explaining that he and Fennell had a lot of discussions about the pros and cons of various aspect ratios. Ultimately, he felt 1.85 would be the most enveloping format simply because it’s the one most cinemas are currently built for. “Unfortunately, most screens now are built for 1.85, and if you see a 2.40 movie, it has matting just like on your TV. When you go to a cinema, you want to see it as big as possible on the screen, and today 1.85 screens are the larger format.” (Jim Hemphill)
The ethos behind the look for “Wuthering Heights” was that sort of flush, the kind of outdoors flush. That’s the weatherbeaten, slightly stylised, look but that kind of idea that, you know, the cheeks are alive. And then throughout the narrative, we’ve also used that blush to display those moments that are evocative of anxiety and arousal and distress and bitterness and all the emotions that they run throughout the film. And I certainly employed it a lot when I’m making up Jacob Elordi. It was something that I used, for example, when he’s at his most distressed, and he’s really florid.” (Sarah Halliwell)
I should note that the title of the film is in quotation marks. Its official name is “Wuthering Heights”. I do understand what she intends with this decision. A clear signifier that this adaptation is something completely separate. Sure, it is based on a text that many people know. But its main interest is taking only certain aspects of the source material rather than being a faithful retelling. My problem with this, and is the main concern to this article, is that Fennell misunderstands the fundamentals of the novel. Yes, a singular perception of Wuthering Heights is ultimately okay. But it just seems like an odd decision to make your film be burdened by high expectations when you have no interest in directly adapting the source material.Does Fennell think her story is romantic? Or provocative? Or is the whole thing meant to be tongue-in-cheek?I really do not know.What I do know is a recent blockbuster film has not left me this perplexed in quite some time. (Adam Affandy in LSU Media)
If I were to be gracious, I would accept that almost two centuries after the novel’s release, society has sufficiently developed to allow her to insert some of the raw sexuality which the original could never be permitted to include. However, my instinct tells me that this kind of film should sound warning bells for a dire media-literacy crisis. I sincerely hope we can limit the number of films we market towards a specific set of 21st century readers and viewers who need to be spoon-fed sexy braindead drivel, in lieu of anything remotely thought-provoking. No disrespect meant to this group, but they have The Kissing Booth, can they not leave the classics alone?Fennell claims that the book was one of her favourites growing up. This justifies me in critiquing the film in relation to the novel which (apparently) served as a model. It also makes me hope that she didn’t read any other books as a child, that they might be spared her inane vision. However, given that Netflix are depicting Basil and Dorian as brothers in their upcoming adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and with no less than three Austen adaptations in the works for studios to decimate trying to appeal to the modern viewer, it might be time to resign as a cinephile and retreat into a library forever. (Nora Miles in Cherwell)
Liberties are taken by Emerald Fennell, which is all well and good. But don’t expect anything like the genius and subtlety of the book. (...)The great folly with this frothy, frilly, romantically filthy adaptation is that Fennell ignores the gothic madness at the heart of the novel. Where were the ghosts? Where was the grave scene with Heathcliff digging up Cathy’s coffin? Wuthering Heights is a depraved novel, ripe with abuse, torture, sadomasochism, and incest, but Fennell’s focus is frocks and fripperies. (Susie Mesure in The Prospect)
This film captures what society has turned into. We allow celebrities to wear old hollywood vintage gowns to modern awards shows, we stomp on history and sexualize it to appeal to a wider audience. I’m appalled at how creatively one can disgrace literature. “Wuthering Heights” was designed so carefully in a vain attempt to create something deep and beautiful, but ended up as a gross film with no direction or discernible value. (Emma Lauzen in Central Times)
To adapt a canonical work is to enter into argument with it and wrestle publicly with its politics, not to merely reupholster its surfaces. Fennell’s visuals often pay off aesthetically, but they rarely do the symbolic work the story requires. When that framework is quietly removed, although it may be beautiful, what remains is no longer accountable. By softening Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity and largely excising Brontë’s class critique, “Wuthering Heights” retreats from the very tensions that make the novel endure—the tensions that serve as the story’s engine.If you go to see “Wuthering Heights,” go for the craft: see what camera, costume, and design can do at full tilt. But don’t mistake that dazzling surface for the moral labor the novel demands. Once you notice what’s been smoothed away, the ache the film sells feels less like tragedy and more like a very, very expensive consolation prize. (Jacob Gardner in The Georgetown Voice)
Lauren Tousignant [2:00 PM]: I am putting on Charli’s soundtrack.Nora Biette-Timmons [2:00 PM]: Dude, I was ABOUT to do the same.LT: And have been transported back to sitting in the theater during the credits.NBT: OK, let’s start there: you’re sitting in the theater as the credits start, what are you thinking/feeling/doing? What was the vibe around you?LT: I was crying, and also laughing that I was crying. It took me a few moments to catch my breath and speak words. I did mostly fucking love it; it was predictable, but I very much felt swept away to the Yorkshire moors in 1800. It was about a 30% full theater, and there were a lot of similar crying/laughing reactions.NBT: Ok, that was NOT the vibe in my theater lol. It was like 75% full and when the screen went black, it was totally silent for a split second and then someone let out an audible sigh.Which made everyone laugh.LT: I think it’s worth noting where we watched…I saw it in a Massachusetts suburb on a Tuesday night.NBT: Fair point. I saw it in Berlin, Germany, also on a Tuesday night.LT: What was YOUR immediate reaction?NBT: “That was ridiculous.”
Infobae (Argentina explains how the Brontë sisters published their book of poems at their own expense, and the story (not supported by any real fact) that Emily wrote a second novel that was burnt by Charlotte. A story repeated on KCH (Ecuador). EsRadio (Spain) also retells Emily Brontë's life. We have to admit that the Daily Mail on this article about the "Brontë blush" gets quite witty, at least in the title: "Margot Robbie just made Brontë blush this season's must-try make-up trend".Polyester lists several Wuthering Heights versions from all around the world. Decider asks which version of Wuthering Heights makes you swoon.
When the album dropped at the stroke of midnight on February 13, I found myself lying in the dark listening to Charli XCX’s album, Wuthering Heights. As her second soundtrack album (after Bottoms in 2023), this record was made for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But this collection of songs also stands as a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel in its own right.The opening track, House, struck me with its ability to succinctly get to the heart of what Wuthering Heights is. It is not just the title of Brontë’s book and Fennell’s film, but also the name of a house, the story’s main setting.Rather than offering a typical three-act structure of beginning, middle and end, Brontë’s novel is an experimental, strange form. I conceive the novel as structured largely by the movement of the characters between the titular Wuthering Heights and neighbouring property Thrushcross Grange. There is a constant movement, a haunting, between poles rather than a clear linear progression from point A to point B.I was pleased, therefore, to see that Charli’s part-film soundtrack, part-book adaptation has adopted this impetus towards formal experimentation – albeit in her own distinct way. (Tolga Akme in The Conversation)
Working-class artists have nothing to gain from being invited into the inner sanctum, or by being given roles in reactionary fluff like Wuthering Heights, if we keep telling the same old tales for the benefit of the same old institutions. The real goal, I say, should be more working-class writers, directors and performers telling their stories and making their work, on their terms. We can do without another boring adaptation of repressed middle-class sexuality, whoever happens to play Cathy. (Josh Guiry)
All eyes have been on Yorkshire with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation, but did you know there is a Cornish connection to the Brontë family?
Alongside her sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte Brontë—one of the famed (and tragically short-lived) Brontës—penned a groundbreaking novel featuring a headstrong, “plain Jane” heroine, with its first third notably narrating Dickensian hardships through a child’s eyes. Not that the book’s initial generation of readers were privy to the author’s true identity; like other early female novelists, Brontë endeavored to skirt the prospect of prejudicial reviews and reception while cloaked in an androgynous nom-de-plum, “Currer Bell.” Here’s what you need to know about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
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