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You could never accuse Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights of being a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – but then fidelity doesn’t appear to be remotely of interest to it. Resplendently lurid, oozy and wild, the new film from the director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman is fixated on its central illicit affair, as conducted by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, to the exclusion of almost all else. It’s an obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions. (...)Trysts are underscored with a series of breathy electro-ballads from Charli XCX. Race-blind casting opens up fruitful new angles on familiar characters: Shazad Latif is superb as Cathy’s suitor Linton, here a hesitant, nouveau riche nice guy; and Hong Chau is just as good as Nelly, her watchful lady’s companion, whose mixed bloodline creates its own complications. The era-straddling sets and costumes share a gasp-inducing sugar-high aesthetic: Jean-Honoré Fragonard meets Juicy Couture. (...)Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency. (Robbie Collin)
Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights is not very faithful to Emily Brontë's novel, but we knew that. [...]Cathy and Heathcliff are still recognisably Brontë's lovers, irresistibly drawn to each other from childhood yet fated to be apart. But Fennell's approach is an extravagant swirl: sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic. There is a lot of standing in the rain and wind, kissing in the rain and wind, and just rain and wind on the Yorkshire moors. She laces the 19th-Century setting with contemporary touches, from its costumes fit for an Oscar red carpet to its sexual frankness. A flesh-coloured wall is based on a scan of Robbie's skin, veins and all.But under it all Fennell channels something essential in the book – the corrosive behaviour that can result from thwarted desire. Jealousy, anger and vengeance are as natural to Cathy and Heathcliff as their endless passion for each other. If you embrace the film's audacious style and think of it as a reinvention not an adaptation, this bold, artful Wuthering Heights is utterly absorbing.The film opens with a jolt of violence, invented by Fennell, that the young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) watches with wide-eyed excitement. The screenplay combines some characters, invents backstories and lops off the second part of the book. Unlike Brontë's version of Cathy's kind father, this Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) drunkenly rescues the abandoned boy Heathcliff (Owen Cooper of Adolescence), takes him back to their rustic home, Wuthering Heights, and brutishly treats him as a servant. The childhood scenes are bracing, but the film quickly moves on.Robbie turns up in the first of many bright red-and-white dresses, and her performance is magnificent, making Cathy wild and selfish but with a conscience, and an innocence beneath her sense of entitlement. And forget her age. Fennell simply makes the characters older. Mr Earnshaw even says, "She's already well past spinsterhood". Elordi embodies Heathcliff's dashing, bad-boy energy, even when stuck with a stringy-haired wig. Heathcliff is more than a shirtless, sweaty hunk, although he is often that. Elordi reveals how defensive and easily wounded he is, how he resents his status as a servant. [...]At times the film's over-the-top choices seem kitschy. Heathcliff rides on horseback against a bright orange sky, long hair flying in the wind as if he escaped from the cover of a romance novel. But overall Fennell uses stylised images well. After Heathcliff leaves, an overhead view shows Cathy slumped on the floor so that all we see is her billowing red skirt, her despair and grief revealed in a single shot. [...]Alison Oliver gives a standout, lively performance as Isabella, Edgar's grown yet childish ward, who adores Cathy and creepily makes a doll with strands of Cathy's actual hair. (Caryn James)
Wuthering Heights is an incredibly moist movie, and that’s without even taking into account how often the characters get caught in or choose to stride out into the rain (all the better to make their outfits cling). A snail leaves a languid slime trail across a window pane, a housemaid squishes shiny dough provocatively between her fingers while making bread at the kitchen table, a scarred back is shown beaded with sweat in a loving close-up — Emerald Fennell’s take on the 1847 Emily Brontë novel practically glistens with fluids. [...]Wuthering Heights is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date. Fennell has an incredible talent for the moment, for extravagant scenes that bypass all higher thought functions to spark a deeper lizard-brained pleasure, and for pop-music-scored montages of such lushness that they could levitate you right out of your seat. But thematic incisiveness has not proven to be her strong suit nor something her heart is in. Promising Young Woman, her directorial debut, got off to an electric start before eventually collapsing under the weight of its own attempts to delve into rage at a world that normalizes and trivializes rape. Saltburn was a collection of delirious imagery that featured some incoherent aspirations toward class commentary. In Wuthering Heights, she throws off the burden of trying to say something significant as one would a crushed velvet cloak when the sun’s finally come out. Fennell surveys Brontë’s saga of doomed passion, obsession, and multigenerational resentment and sums it up as the story of two incredibly messy bitches who can’t stay away from one another. That she’s onto something in terms of the work’s essence makes the smooth-brained sensuality of her third feature even better.Like most Wuthering Heights adapters, Fennell sticks to the first volume of the book, focusing on the unshakeable bond that starts forming between Cathy and Heathcliff during their childhood together in the drafty farmhouse of the title, and that threatens to destroy them as they grow into adults separated by expectations surrounding their social status. But she streamlines things further, excising not just the complicated second generation of Earnshaws, Heathcliffs, and Lintons, but also the framing story, as well as the presence of Cathy’s older brother, Hindley. When the film begins, Cathy, played when young by Charlotte Mellington, lives with Nelly Dean (Vy Nguyen), who in this incarnation is the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat who’s been hired as her companion, as well as a handful of servants and her mercurial, gambling- and alcohol-addicted father (Martin Clunes). When the Earnshaw patriarch impulsively saves an urchin (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) from the streets of Liverpool and takes him in, he assigns the wide-eyed boy to Cathy, who provides him his name, as her “pet.” “I shall be very kind, unless you are bad, and then I will pinch you,” she informs him gleefully, and, to Heathcliff’s great misfortune, this worrying statement earns her his unending devotion.Wuthering Heights has the tunnel-vision horniness and girlish aesthetic sensibility of a high-school freshman who’s been assigned to read Brontë in class while tearing through a pile of explicit bodice-rippers under the covers at home. For instance: Heathcliff at one point grabs Cathy by her corset in order to hoist her up one-handed to kiss her, which is the kind of logistically impossible move that feels lifted right out of a hormonally overheated daydream. Cathy is only ever in outfits that billow, whether that involves veils, dresses, or the full red skirts she starts wearing after marrying Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), the wealthy bachelor next door who’s a more sensible match than the societally inappropriate Heathcliff. Heathcliff, after disappearing for years when Cathy spurns him for the other man, reemerges dramatically out of the mist as a fuckboy version of Mr. Darcy in riding boots, a cravat, a hoop earring, and gold tooth. Edgar’s luxurious estate, which he shares with his childlike ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), has red lacquer floors and a fireplace formed out of dozens of plaster hands, and has as much in common with Lily Allen’s late Brooklyn brownstone as it does with anything period appropriate. Is this all delicious? It sure is, in the way that feels like it’s definitely going to make your stomach hurt afterward.At the chiseled core of it all are Robbie and Elordi, but also Hong Chau, who plays the adult Nelly, and who accompanies Cathy in her move to the Linton household. Elordi — who, on the much-discussed spectrum of Heathcliff’s ethnic ambiguity, occupies the “white, but capable of tanning” side of the scale — understands the assignment best of all, though his is admittedly the easiest. His Heathcliff isn’t a character so much as he is the embodiment of a dozen conflicting, sometimes contradictory desires — a hulking brute who, especially in the beginning, is not that far off from the hot Frankenstein’s monster that nabbed the actor his first Oscar nomination, but who in other times is a wounded, sensitive soul tormented by longing, or a smirking, dominant seducer who appears to know everything the women he encounters want. Robbie is a little too gentle on Cathy, who can be imperious and vindictive, but only ever in ways that are meant to be understandable, because the movie needs her to be a martyr to this all-consuming connection that can’t be denied.It’s Chau who, in a funny way, becomes an audience surrogate, watching this grand affair but also rolling her eyes and, increasingly, meddling impatiently in it, like someone who’s gotten tired of dealing with the endless cycle of makeups and breakups between two members of her friend group and just wishes they’d both move on already. In a movie that finds the idea of dying for love as romantic as living for it, she provides a necessary balance — not skeptical of the epic emotions the lovers feel, but a wry reminder of how tiresome it would be to have to live with two people so convinced of their main-character energy. (Alison Willmore)
Trust that I write this sentence as a bona fide, BA-possessing member of the English-major-for-life crowd: No, you’re not going to see Cathy Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, or Linton Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell‘s loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights.” And no, you’re not going to miss them. Really.That’s not to say that Fennell’s serious snipping of Brontë’s original material and her profound pruning of the Earnshaw and Linton family trees isn’t noticeable, but her devotion to the central relationship of Catherine Earnshaw and the mononymous Heathcliff makes for more than enough juicy material for the film‘s 136-minute running time. But if Fennell, who also wrote the film’s script, was bold enough to do away with more than half of its source material and at least nine of its major characters, why didn’t she go further? [...]“Be more pervy,” my notes from the film’s screening include, and that’s a feeling that permeated the last 90 minutes of the film. If you’re going to go there, go there. If love is going to ruin these two, let’s ruin them. (A third act sequence with Elordi and standout co-star Alison Oliver does, however, go suitably wild, though none of it is built around being titillating in the slightest, but the level of ambition and to-hell-with-convention bent is sorely missed elsewhere.)Instead, however, Fennell chooses to divert that energy to more traditional themes and tones: love ruins Cathy and Heathcliff and just about everyone around them, and keeping them apart is such a toxic endeavor that it batters the sanity, logic, and reason of anyone who comes in contact with them. Edgar, Isabella, Nelly (Hong Chau, the film’s quiet, rage-filled center), they all suffer too. And why not? This story is set in a gruesome, violent, vile world. Hell, the whole thing opens with a public hanging, one attended by both a young Heathcliff (“Adolescence” breakout Owen Cooper) and a positively overjoyed Cathy (Charlotte Mellington). [...]In one of the film’s most evocative montages (in a film that leans far too hard on them), we watch Cathy spin through entire years at the Linton family estate, Thrushcross Grange, a mash-up of Barbie Dream House and Alice’s Wonderland, pink and big-skirted and high-haired and bubbly and be-ribboned and just so, so wrong. If she’s trying to distract herself from the loss of Heathcliff, the spectacular sequence works a trick, for both Cathy and the audience. [...]Fennell and Sandgren’s compositions are frequently awe-inspiring, from a sequence that sees Cathy sweeping across the moors in her wedding dress to the eventual foggy reunion between the lovers that slowly pulls Elordi into relief while a searching Cathy searches for clarity. It looks stunning, even when it turns oddly stagy and confined (the Earnshaw family home looks like a set, and while that might be the point, that intention seems out of place in this otherwise richly made world).Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here. By cutting so much of Brontë’s sprawling novel down to the quick, by focusing so squarely on just Cathy and Heathcliff, we’re trapped only in the immediacy of their doomed affection, which is never allowed to be hot enough to make the entire effort come together, let alone come undone. (Kate Erbland)
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is stellar sensory overload with ostentatious costumes and production design, which interestingly leans into rich people being totally weird. (Edgar outfits Cathy’s bedroom with walls made to look like her skin, complete with veins and moles.) The movie also offers a bunch of original Charli XCX tunes, spawning a soundtrack much better than the singer’s own lackluster mockumentary.It's the director’s filmmaking, though, that's striking, showing new depth from the woman who made the delicious “Promising Young Woman” and out-there “Saltburn.” She uses misty English moors and oncoming lightning storms to symbolize the broody, electric couple and their complicated emotions. And Fennell fashions visual callbacks to hauntingly reflect Cathy and Heathcliff’s childhood in their adult lives, a nod to their arrested development but also the kind of naive, tight-knit bond only children can have.Fennell has gone so far with Brontë’s beloved book that there’s bound to be discourse, whether it’s Heathcliff's mysterious ethnicity (he’s described as a “dark-skinned gipsy” in the novel) or him and Cathy being aged up from teens. But you can’t argue with Robbie and Elordi's chemistry when it comes to exuding love, hate and everything in between.Cathy can be selfish and maddening, Heathcliff is both aloof and dastardly, yet they’re never unlikable. And while their steamy, sweaty dalliances are hot and heavy (albeit mostly clothed), most swoonworthy are the smaller moments, like Heathcliff gently cupping his hands to keep the rain out of Cathy’s eyes.Hong Chau is a great choice for the adult Nelly, a quietly resentful sort who causes more friction in Cathy and Heathcliff's tempestuous situation. Latif lends an inherent goodness to Edgar that makes him a foil for Heathcliff but also a better man for Cathy. Cooper, an Emmy winner for “Adolescence,” is just as important as Elordi for their character’s arc. However, the one supporting player you might obsess over is Oliver, enchantingly eccentric as a sexually repressed innocent embroiled in Heathcliff’s revenge quest.With flair and bombast to spare, Fennell reaches such great “Heights” that this feels like the first must-see movie of 2026, an enthralling retelling of an all-time love story through an accessibly modern lens. (Brian Truitt)
To situate it in terms of Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte, Fennell’s approach feels more “Wide Sargasso Sea” than “Jane Eyre”: sophisticated fan fiction that revels in heaving bosoms, damp flesh and kinky sex (just not between Catherine and Heathcliff). There have been more than enough polite, repressive tellings of the classic Romantic novel, which centers on a young woman raised on the Yorkshire moors who betrays her heart — fearing ruin, she chooses the financial stability of a comfortable marriage over her wild-willed soulmate — and suffers for it in the long run. [...]Of all the visual flourishes Fennell allows herself, Heathcliff’s departure is the most striking: She frames Elordi, bearded and betrayed, in silhouette against a deep crimson sky. He appears at once shattered and defiant, like Scarlett O’Hara just before intermission in “Gone With the Wind.” It’s ridiculously overripe, but exquisite, the sort of indulgence that sets some viewers vibrating and others rolling their eyes. It’s also the clearest clue yet to Fennell’s operatic interpretation of the material, which finds its musical equivalent in Anthony Willis’ score and a handful of tortured-love songs from Charli xcx (of which “Chains of Love” most closely nails the film’s sadomasochistic subtext).Ratcheted up to such heights, “Wuthering” risks smothering those whom “Saltburn” struck as too much. And yet, this is what a generation of moviegoers thrilled by the stylistic excess of A24 and Neon movies want from the big-screen experience. As in the scene where Nelly tightens Catherine’s corset till it nearly snaps her ribs, the movie is meant to evoke extreme sensations. For nearly two centuries, Brontë’s book has been a romantic fantasy for readers. Fennell treats it as an erotic one as well, leaning into all that is sensual: a bed full of broken eggs, a stable tryst involving whips and bridles, Catherine pleasuring herself en plein air. The list goes on.Fennell ditches the back half of the book (pretty much everything that happens after a key character’s death), while reading a great deal of unspoken desire between the lines. The ultimate bad boy of Victorian literature, Heathcliff comes across less devilish here than he does in Brontë’s book, though there’s a deliciously naughty streak to the way he seeks revenge on Catherine, asking consent from Linton’s sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) to use her for this very purpose. It’s fascinating to see Elordi play this monstrous brute so soon after embodying Frankenstein’s creation, and surprising that there’s less flesh on display here, but no fewer scars.Heathcliff needs no redeeming — his roguishness is half the appeal — and yet, Robbie’s emboldened Catherine assumes more responsibility for the couple’s unhappiness … and also more complicity in exploring what might have been. The trouble with letting these two to satisfy their lust is that it defuses the very dynamic that has gone so long unrequited.After “Saltburn,” which climaxed with one character scandalously making love to another’s grave, Fennell had to shock us somehow. Instead of repeating herself (or earlier adaptations), the director cuts short the pair’s pleasure. But not ours. (Peter Debruge)
Fennell’s lurid and dramatic reimagining of Emily Brontë’s literary classic is similarly stormy, aggressive, and distracted with kink. And its biggest turn-ons would seem to be the kind of lush excesses associated with studio melodramas of yesteryear. (...)This is not the Victorian England in which the Brontës lived, nor the feel-good fairytale land of modern streaming service bodice-rippers, which gloss the genre over with a veneer as hot as a season’s greetings card from Hallmark. Nay, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights lives in a seething, ancient decrepit place that only existed in the movies of yore, and in its best moments she transports viewers back to the kind of sweeping spectacle that can beguile and enrapture. (...)Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is less an adaptation of the novel than it is a lascivious daydream of what every young, repressed non-reader imagines when staring up at its stylized title on a dorm room wall, or while listening to the spooky synths of Kate Bush crooning about running along ‘em moors. It is Fifty Shades of Technicolor Rouge, wherein each fetid desire, and implicit moral corruption that’s simply suggested on the page, is made achingly, swooningly vivid in a movie that jettisons the multigenerational degradation and even supernatural underpinnings of the book in favor of an epically bad romance. (...)Despite warping and drastically reducing the scope of the story, it still feels too vast and unwieldy for Fennell to firmly get her arms around. That probably won’t matter though to most audiences, including ultimately myself. The filmmaker has such command of the tone and vibe she seeks that it is easy to become drunk on the sheer beauty of her and Sandgren’s cavernous compositions in the dilapidated ruins of Wuthering Heights’ carriage house. Sunlight steals through a hundred cracks in the ceiling, creating an unlikely halo around Heathcliff and Cathy, even in moments of exquisite damnation. (David Crow)
Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date—a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. The camera lingers on dripping egg yolks and squishy, bubbling dough; the protagonist, Cathy Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie), must wade through pig’s blood on her way to the moors near her home, leaving a trim of viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress. This is Fennell’s aesthetic throughout: loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface.The clash of beauty and filth is well-suited for Brontë’s desolate tale of romance in a tempestuous climate, where Cathy is constantly caught between Victorian propriety and her baser, wilder nature. Fennell’s take is thuddingly blunt; it brings the book’s simmering sexual repression to a boil. Wuthering Heights, sprawling and objectively tough to capture faithfully, hinges on the unbalanced, teenage energy of its central relationship—here, expressed through glossy, MTV-esque visuals that the director deploys with aplomb. (...)Robbie and Elordi’s chemistry is strong, and both are major Hollywood talents who can smirk, scream, and sob with the best of them. The gleeful visuals and sounds, however, are what really propel the movie along. There are ravishing songs by the pop star Charli XCX, surprisingly none of them too out of place; some truly ridiculous costume choices for Cathy as she embraces Edgar’s hoity-toity life; and all of that goo, blood, and viscera. (...)The story’s dreamy and at times ludicrous emotional landscape often struggles on more realistic grounding. In 2011, the great director Andrea Arnold attempted a version of Wuthering Heights with a much more muted, credible tone, even casting a mixed-race actor in the role of Heathcliff (in the book, his ethnic background is pointedly ambiguous). Although Arnold’s attempt was interesting, it felt flat, bereft of Brontë’s eccentric flourishes. Fennell has streamlined the book’s narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages. (David Sims)
Teachers won’t be playing this movie in English Lit class anytime soon.Not unless their kink is angry emails.For one, Emerald Fennell’s R-rated “Wuthering Heights” has a healthy amount of sex scenes — far more, anyway, than the novel’s zero.And that’s not the only bold departure from the Victorian-Era source material.If high school students were to watch the film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi to study for final exams, they’d have to repeat sophomore year. Fennell’s telling deviates from Emily Brontë’s 1847 book with abandon.Plotlines get changed or chopped, the cast of characters has been streamlined to less than 10, the costumes are as period-accurate to the 19th century as a Honda Accord and there is a song by Charli xcx.You know what? That’s great. Have at it. “Wuthering Heights” is 179 years old and much too complicated a story — both psychologically and structurally — to faithfully adapt on-screen into anything resembling a good time. (...)Traditionalists will moan that Fennell has turned Brontë’s book into a sweeping romance. And, yes, she has. Music swells, tears flow, faces are perfect.But what makes the movie so enthralling is that she hits on a powerful tug-of-war: We root hard for Heathcliff and Cathy, even though we know full well we shouldn’t. (Johnny Oleksinski)
Sometimes, you watch a film and wish the creative just decided to make an original film and that’s where I’m at with Wuthering Heights. The Emerald Fennell adaptation feels less like Emily Brontë’s work and more like a fanfiction take on Heathcliff and Catherine. (...)There is something truly captivating about this adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” The lack of care over the period put me at a weird sense of ease. I knew that this wasn’t going to be a “textbook” adaptation and for the most part, I was fine with that and along for the ride. But there is also a glaring issue through this adaptation of Brontë’s most famous work. (...)Whenever I think on Wuthering Heights, I am conflicted. I do think that Fennell made an absolutely breathtaking film. But it is barely an adaptation. It is essentially someone’s thoughts on Wuthering Heights if they read it once and forgot a lot of the important beats of it. Which is why, prior to seeing it, I thought it was going to be a woman’s “idea” of Wuthering Heights. And in a way, it is. But it leans more towards an actual adaptation than something different. (Rachel Leishman)
Removed from its source material (at least in the mind of this one particular ignoramus), Fennel’s Wuthering Heights is a striking, sensual movie filled with big gestures and bold stylistic choices. No one in Wuthering Heights, either in front of the camera or behind it, does anything halfway. The colors are vibrant, the costumes are extravagant, the music swells and roars, and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi tear at each other’s clothing and suck on each other’s faces (and, occasionally, move tastefully in the vicinity of other body parts). (...)[The film] looks and sounds fantastic, peppers its torrid love story with a few moments of absurd humor — did I mention the veiny, fleshy wallpaper? — and carries itself with the assured confidence of its Byronic hero. (I’m a philistine, but I’m not a dummy.) (Matt Singer)
There is notably more plot to Brontë’s novel than in Fennell’s reimagining, and while the film doesn’t need a denser narrative, it could benefit from feeling more grounded — especially when Cathy and Heathcliff fight and fornicate like teenagers, ricocheting between lust and loathing. “I hated you, I loved you, too” is all well and good, but here the stakes become more subdued as style takes over. The film is undeniably expertly crafted, and Fennell — who has quickly risen to become one of Britain’s buzziest Hollywood exports — has certainly stepped up as a filmmaker in terms of scope. But had Wuthering Heights stayed closer to earth, the weight of this tragic romance would hit harder.Fennell throws everything at this fever-dream adaptation, which massages the senses while showcasing Elordi’s ever-growing star power. If only its electrically erotic energy was sustained to the end. (Beth Webb)
I am pleased to report that Robbie, and there shouldn’t really be any doubts given her priors, overcomes any preconceptions about her beachy breeziness and supercharges Catherine. It is a total thrill. (...)Fennell knows what she is doing, and while Brontë purists may gasp, it is a lot of fun. And not totally off the mark. If any figure from history can understand the power of transformation, longing for feeling and being subject to the whims of others, it is Barbara Millicent Roberts. (Henry Wong)
Is it faithful? Not particularly. Is it memorable? Absolutely. Fennell’s adaptation may divide audiences, but it pulses with a boldness and cinematic confidence that make it difficult to ignore. For viewers willing to embrace a stylised, modernised interpretation rather than a traditional period drama, this Wuthering Heights offers a lurid, provocative and strangely compelling ride, one that captures the novel’s ferocious emotional core, even as it rewrites the rules completely. (Linda Marric)
There is no denying that “Wuthering Heights” will inspire fierce debate. But there is also no denying its craft, ambition, and emotional conviction. Emerald Fennell has created something audacious, seductive, and deeply personal. Supported by spellbinding cinematography, sumptuous design, and led by two fearless lead performances that go for broke, this version of “Wuthering Heights” may come to define a new era of romantic filmgoers. Dirty and overlong as it may be, it is also mesmerizing and at times, yes, even moving. For those who like their emotions, romance, and cinema big, this is a swooning, breathless experience that will satisfy those desires while leaving you yearning for more. Against all better judgment, the romantic in me fell hard for it. (Matt Neglia)
This is not your Penguin Classics school curriculum edition. [...]Fennell’s overhaul flirts with insanity, and if you can let go of preconceived notions about how this story should be told, it’s arguably the writer-director’s most purely entertaining film — pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color and opulent design, laced with anachronistic flourishes, sexy, pervy, irreverent and resonantly tragic. Often teetering on the verge between silly and clever, it’s Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation, guaranteed to moisten tear ducts and inflame young hearts. [...]Mr. Earnshaw is capricious — jolly one minute, enraged the next — and Cathy to some degree shares that unpredictable nature. “This’ll be your pet,” her father tells her of Heathcliff, and she takes an instant liking to him. But Cathy can also be cruelly insensitive, notably to her bookish companion Nelly (Hong Chau), the illegitimate daughter of a Lord who paid to have her hidden away. It’s Heathcliff who tells Cathy, “I will never leave you, no matter what you do.” But that vow could just as easily apply to Nelly. [...]Robbie tackles Cathy’s complexity head on; she’s driven as much by carnal as emotional needs and not averse to the pleasure of power games, at times bordering on sadism. When Heathcliff says he would take any number of beatings to spare her, the faintest trace of a smile on her face speaks volumes.Fennell knows exactly what she’s doing, creating thirst-trap meme fodder with a shot of smoldering Elordi, I mean Heathcliff, shirtless and sweaty, stacking hay bales. The moment is so close to gay farmer porn I giggled. [...]There’s a melodramatic grandiosity to much of this, a touch of the overwrought, which you either go with or you don’t. I found it fun, not gonna lie. Fennell shuffles her English lit influences — either by accident or by design — with some scenes playing more like Austen or Dickens. But whatever its flaws or virtues, this movie seems to know exactly what its core audience wants and delivers it with the intensity of tempestuous winds and torrential downpours.There’s nothing timid or stiflingly tasteful about Fennell’s direction — though there’s nothing terribly fluid about it either. The visual scheme is rooted in the period but flirts with modern times — from Linus Sandgren’s spectacular cinematography through Suzie Davis’ sumptuous production design and Jacqueline Durran’s over-the-top fantasy costumes in eye-searing reds and metallics. And Anthony Willis’ score, intertwined with original songs by Charli xcx, effectively pumps up the romance and the tragedy. [...]Either way, the leads are captivating and their chemistry sizzles. Robbie (a producer here, as well as on Fennell’s previous films Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) is in full bloom, walking a tightrope between infuriating recklessness and devastating regret. Often, she seems more like Katherina from The Taming of the Shrew than Catherine Earnshaw. But Elordi (the second lead in Saltburn) inarguably is the standout. Even after showing the monstrousness of which Heathcliff is capable, he ensures we still see a broken heartthrob driven by love and madness into the abyss.Clunes, Oliver and the quietly affecting Latif all nail their characters with brushstrokes ranging from broad to finely detailed. But as is so often the case, it’s Chau who steals every scene, using her character’s stillness and alert gaze to great effect. Like Heathcliff, Nelly is forever stained by the stigma of class, stoking ambiguity as to whether her loyalty to Cathy is forged in love or hate. Conflicted feelings like those might well represent how many people respond to Fennell’s movie. (David Rooney)
Fennell brings out the big guns to snap us back to life. With adulthood come Robbie and Elordi. The reek of animal attraction is strong. “I can smell you from here,” Cathy tells Heathcliff. Going full Yorkshire, Elordi flattens his vowels to make brusque double entendres.By now, Fennell’s vision is getting tonally crowded. As the sexual tension cranks, the mood feels like an arthouse Carry On, with lingering shots of gloopy egg whites. The rest of the movie grabs the attention so hard, Charli XCX does the soundtrack and you don’t even notice. [...]You may tire, though, of the movie’s urge to constantly give us new things to gawp at — or perhaps give them to TikTok, which helped make Saltburn a viral hit. The films creaks under the far-out costumes, jewelled anachronisms, strawberries as big as your head, crimson floors polished to a liquid shine.You would think the point is meant to be how vapid it all seems besides the returning Heathcliff. If so, the scales are out of whack. Next to the hats and furniture, the much-vaunted trysts between Robbie and Elordi feel quick and cursory. Sorry people, but the kink proves mostly straitlaced, the S&M more M&S. [...]As in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the male lead is asked to bring real emotion to a movie bloated with artifice. But this Heathcliff would be hard work for even the most nimble actor, which Elordi may or may not be. Whatever the flavour of past Wuthering Heights, the character is a danger — a wild man. Here, he has the sad eyes of a Labradoodle locked out of the front room.Robbie too might come to question her work here. Cathy’s long stint as a dress-up doll sees her frozen in place, and the star spends a lot of the film looking a little glazed and uncertain. Maybe that just comes with the job — the look of a woman trapped in someone else’s quotation marks. (Danny Leigh)
Literal and figurative storms accompany his eventual moneyed return. Now in the starry form of Margot Robbie, often dressed, inexplicably, like an Alpine milkmaid, and Jacob Elordi, a caber of landscape made flesh, the couple spread bottomless misery wherever their blustery passion touches down. [...]Fennell, who has already had a crack at interclass amour fou with Saltburn, makes her distinctive presence felt in the knowingly vulgar – somewhat inconsistent – visuals and in a clash of cheeky anachronisms that keep the soundtrack on awkward edge: Charli XCX’s smart beats rubbing against the folk singer Olivia Chaney’s lovely version of The Dark-Eyed Sailor.The nightmarishly heightened contrast between the horrors of Wuthering Heights (pyramids of bottles stacked near tiling that suggests Derek Jarman’s work for the Russell film The Devils) and the stifling civilisation of the Lintons’ Thrushcross Grange (think Austen pimped up for a themed Las Vegas casino) will surely secure the film’s production designer, Suzie Davies, awards in a year’s time.The supporting cast are flawless in their dedication to an aesthetic that heightens the poisonous chemistry at the heart of the core relationship. Clunes is magnificently doomed as the Earnshaws’ thirsty pater familias. Alison Oliver, from Cork, is better still as a character often undersold in adaptations. Her Isabella Linton is first encountered as a hilarious Cathy superfan – she’d be drooling over her every Insta post in 2026 – before becoming disturbingly compliant in Heathcliff’s literal enslavement of her.The problem – and it is no small one – rests with the leads. Elordi is fine as an unthinking hunk of abusive resentment. But the script cannot make sense of this Cathy as someone of Robbie’s age. At least one sarky crack confirms the character is no longer supposed to be a teenager (or anything close), but the dialogue does not satisfactorily retune Cathy to a woman in her 30s.It would have been a nice trick to pull off, because, much rubbished by those who haven’t seen it, “Wuthering Heights”, is, elsewhere, successful at nodding politely to the original text while snubbing its nose at slavish faithfulness. The wallowing in sexually suggestive egg yolk. The hilariously phallic architecture. Oliver chained to the fireplace. Better that than another politely reverent variation on Sunday-evening telly. (Donald Clarke)
It’s a dare, and an invitation to experience all the ways Fennell herself felt the arousing sway of the classic, where she sees lust and demise as two inseparable sides of the same coin, if her opening is any indication.After this powerful proposition, it is unfortunate that the film that follows becomes an increasingly timid affair, with a series of aggressively styled set pieces and, inexplicably, even oppressively hushed emotions. [...]Instead of an effervescently out-there emotional scope, she gives us something halfway, intriguingly sizzling when yearning takes center stage between Robbie and Elordi, two of the greatest actors working today, but oddly cold and even wooden when the duo finally falls into each other’s arms. It brings me no pleasure to say that the rain-soaked kiss scene in the trailer (“let us both be damned”) is perhaps the most believably sensual intimacy scene in the movie—elsewhere, there are several shy and lifeless ones. And it’s curious that the leads’ intense chemistry lands mostly when they are lust-filled yet apart by circumstance. This seems to have less to do with Robbie and Elordi, but more with Fennell’s style-over-substance approach to the material. [...] It’s hard to feel free when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things. [...]The strongest segment of Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is its first chapter, when we are introduced to the world of young Catherine and Heathcliff (Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper of “Adolescence”). [...]Matched perfectly in their volatility, the two grow up causing trouble, having fun over the expansive and foggy Yorkshire moors, and misbehaving, with Heathcliff often taking the blame for Cathy’s wrongdoings. Meanwhile, there is also the housekeeper Nelly (played by the great Hong Chau, with Vy Nguyen in a younger role). One of the book’s main narrators, she is defined here more by her silent observations as Cathy’s lifelong friend and companion, derailing a possible romance between Cathy and Heathcliff. A deeply emotive performer, Chau is absolutely perfect in the part—so much so that you increasingly wish Fennell’s adaptation allowed her character a crescendo or two. [...]sister Isabella (a scene-stealing Alison Oliver) [...]On paper, the stakes couldn’t be higher. But in Fennell’s hands, the all-consuming nature of the world feels softened, even flattened. Then again, maybe it is just crushed under the production design and costuming choices, often eye-popping in all the wrong ways. There is something too tidy and uninteresting about the great majority of Robbie’s garments during Cathy’s Thrushcross Grange years. The problem isn’t the contemporary liberties the costuming takes with the Georgian era of the story—period inaccuracy in aesthetics can be a wonderful creative asset in film—but the taste level.There are some inspired pieces, like Cathy’s lush wedding gown, and a richly draped black frock that Linus Sandgren’s high-contrast lensing casts in white light. But for the most part, the costuming reminded this critic of the standard-issue Barbie doll gowns she used to collect in her dollhouse. (Peerless costume designer Jacqueline Durran dressed Robbie in “Barbie” too.) And Suzie Davies’ production design explores several interesting concepts, but many of them don’t blend into the story’s Gothic hues. Cathy’s pink Thrushcross Grange room feels almost comically bare, going against the visual excess we yearn for in these types of melodramas. And the wall dressings that are supposed to represent Cathy’s freckled skin are certainly an idea, but whether it’s a good one is debatable. Elsewhere, the location (shot actually in Yorkshire) and Sandgren’s cinematography of high contrasts, deep reds, and fog—lots of fog—feel cinematic enough. Though the whole thing feels like an artificial music video, rather than an inviting fantastical world we want to get lost in. Charli xcx’s admittedly beautiful (but ultimately distracting) songs and musical cues further this feeling.Fennell is a bold filmmaker unafraid to try something new and unexpected. And “Wuthering Heights” deserves some recognition for being a movie that she made entirely on her own terms. If only those terms ignited the riotous feelings that we were promised. (Tomris Laffly)
Key to understanding what you’re getting from Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is recognizing how intentional those scare quotes around the title on the poster actually are. This take on Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel is less an adaptation of the story as it exists on the page than of how it haunts our cultural memory. That is, not as a tale of generational trauma and doomed obsession, but as a kinky, heavily stylized, bodice-ripping romance that provides Fennell a canvas on which to flaunt her aesthetic and thematic intentions. Like a particularly impressive aspic, Wuthering Heights is tantalizing to behold but not so easy to swallow. [...]The film’s world is a tactile feast of goopy eroticized forms and textures from runny eggs to sticky mounds of dough to literal snail trails glistening across windowpanes. This rooting around in prurience befits an adaptation that has little interest in respecting its iconic source material, given how it underlines things that Brontë only alludes to.Here, the characters proclaim loudly what they left unsaid on the page, and Cathy and Heathcliff consummate their love for one another many times cover. Midway through the film, when Cathy utters, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff,” it’s hard how to imagine how that could possibly be the case. Robbie is faintly ridiculous as the incorrigible Cathy, pulling faces in the film’s early going like a clumsy rom-com heroine, but she comports herself far better playing Cathy as a wilting flower as the story lumbers toward its tragic conclusion. [...]Fennell has been criticized for the casting of Elordi as another example of whitewashing a character for whom there’s contemporary scholarship to suggest may be non-white, yet the filmmaker’s total disinterest in Heathcliff’s interiority and the conditions that mark him as a marginalized other, at least in this case, serve to make his race immaterial. This is notable, as most screen versions of Wuthering Heights align themselves with Heathcliff’s outsider perspective, but Fennell’s adaptation is Cathy’s show. More interesting still, Elordi’s take on the famously feral and villainous antihero is more kicked puppy than mad dog, and Fennell saves her ire for the woman on which she centers the story.The film delights in seeing women corseted, bridled, crawling like beasts or with masculine hands placed over their faces. Fennell seems to be prodding us with the imagery of erotic submission that was once the purview of Harlequin romances but has now gone mainstream in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey and the dawn of BookTok. But there’s also a timeless, confessional quality to her overheated assertion that as much as women desire kindness, comfort, and fancy things, they also yearn to feel the rough hands of men with gold teeth.Yet the film’s flirtations with a deeper rumination on the lot of women who feel they have to choose wealth and status in a world that devalues, dehumanizes, and objectifies them are basically just foreplay. (A room papered in the plush pinks of Cathy’s skin, complete with birthmarks and blue veins, is a recurrent image in search of a thesis.) Fennell stops short of offering a truly penetrating message, turning Cathy’s desire for Linton into a clear-cut decision between love and vanity. Ultimately, Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s selfish and materialistic, not because she’s a 19th-century woman with limited prospects.The way Fennell seemingly sees it, patriarchy is an annoyance, racial difference as a distraction, and love is simply a matter of choice. As for wealth, it’s the most suffocating of prisons. That’s a message that’s hard to take seriously in our current socio-historical moment, and doubly so given how Fennell is enamored with that particular cage and how it sparkles. (Rocco T. Thompson)
Fennell reduces her story to a more simplistic narrative about hate and its polluting ripple effects. (...)In these sex-deprived times at the cinema, if some corset kink, power games and smoldering star power from two genetically blessed Australians is what you’re looking for, “Wuthering Heights” might just satisfy that big-screen itch. There are myriad pleasures to be had in the bold, absurd pageantry and devilish scheming. Alison Oliver’s comic timing as the naive, skittish Isabella Linton is a particular delight. With the right crowd, it could make for a fun night out at the movies.Yet for all the big swings, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” amounts to something oddly shallow and blunt: garish and stylized fan fiction with the scope and budget of an old-school Hollywood epic. (...)There is also a conscious artificiality to the film, especially at the Grange. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran was beholden to no specific period and drew on all manner of inspiration to create the looks, including 1950s soundstage melodramas. The set design is a little absurd too — Catherine’s bedroom has been painted to match her skin color (moles and veins and all). It’s not uninteresting to look at, but as a storytelling aid, the surreal, pop art choices are often more distracting than additive. (...)Fennell clearly has so many ideas swirling around, which is fitting for a story like “Wuthering Heights.” And yet as a viewing experience, it is an undernourishing feast, neither dangerous nor hot enough. (Lindsey Bahr)
As a take on "Wuthering Heights," Fennell's approach to the thematically rich text leaves much to be desired, but as cinematic retelling of a 14-year-old's fanfic interpretation of a forbidden romance — it's breathtaking. The production ingredients and performances in "Wuthering Heights" are spectacular, but if the audience needs to essentially throw out the book entirely in order to enjoy the movie, why pretend it's an adaptation at all? (...)The look of "Wuthering Heights" is so stunning and so striking that it makes the thematic shortcomings all the more frustrating. It turns the film into a "great gowns, beautiful gowns" adaptation, overshadowing the gorgeous albeit impractical accomplishments on screen. (...)The one person who truly matches Emerald Fennell's freak in "Wuthering Heights," however, is Alison Oliver as Isabella. In what is perhaps the most interesting departure from the source material, Isabella is reimagined from a victim of Heathcliff's rage and abuse into a young woman seduced by the chance to be a live-in submissive pet. (...)This is not an adaptation of "Wuthering Heights," but the result of what happens when you're playing an approximation "Wuthering Heights" without a full grasp on the material but all the money in the world to bring your questionable imagination to life. (BJ Colangelo)
Emerald Fennell’s Stylish Spin on the Classic Novel is More Bodice Ripper Than Brontë Gripper. (...)Still, somehow, through its beautiful yet garish visuals and its specific intensity, “Wuthering Heights” should evoke a passionate response, especially from viewers unfamiliar with the story. But for fans of the book who can imagine what could have been, it may drive you mad. (Sophia Ciminello)
This wild reimagining of Emily Bronte’s novel seems to have replaced huge chunks of her classic with pages from a Mills & Boon, a couple of chapters from Alice In Wonderland and pictures from an S&M catalogue. (...)Like a latex-covered daydream of every schoolgirl forced to read the 1847 book, the film sees class-crossed lovers Cathy and Heathcliff romp their way towards disaster, in place of the sexless rom-zero-com Brontë wrote. (...)This over-stylised drama is fierce and fun — but unfortunately it is also sex over substance. (Dulcie Pearce)
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi sizzle, but Wuthering Heights isn't quite the full Brontë. (...)True to her word, the writer-director's Wuthering Heights — sorry, "Wuthering Heights" — is the kind of fanfic fever dream that feels ripped from the cover of some lurid pulp imprint, full of Gothic spires, crashing thunder, strained bodices and torrid coupling. (...)As magnetic as Elordi and Robbie are as performers, no amount of steamy montages can quite convince us that they're souls entwined in the cosmos, the kind of supernatural pairing whose whims seemed to command the elements — one of the reasons Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights remains undefeated as the greatest adaptation of the novel; a feat it achieves in all of four minutes and 29 seconds.Still, Fennell's Wuthering Heights is most definitely her own, and if you want to see Jacob Elordi hoisting up Margot Robbie by the bodice with one hand — and let's face it, who doesn't — her lurid, lusty adaptation may well satisfy your Valentine's Day craving. Hooting and hollering at this hot mess is all part of the fun. (Luke Goodsell)
Visually, “Wuthering Heights” is top-notch. Fennell has a good eye for a mesmerising visual palette with the help of Linus Sandgren’s atmospheric cinematography. Both production and costume designs are exquisite, namely Cathy’s ethereal white bridal gown, looking like it comes alive straight out of a fashion magazine. Too bad Fennell’s eclectic styles can only do so much, even with the additional worthwhile moments coming from Robbie, Elordi, along with the supporting players. (...)It doesn’t help either when the movie tends to overstay its welcome with a punishing 136-minute runtime, which could have used some tightening on the bodice (read: editing). Given the massive hype and expectations surrounding “Wuthering Heights”, it’s a pity Fennell’s highly anticipated romantic drama comes across as a missed opportunity.
Who knew Isabella Linton was the best character in Wuthering Heights? She is in this vapid Brontë adaptation, anyway, a film that is enlivened briefly whenever she appears on screen, wickedly played by Alison Oliver. Otherwise, with a chemistry-free central romance between the bizarrely uninteresting Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie, also the film’s producer), this film self-deflates. [...]Back to Isabella, though, who is the heiress of the swanky Yorkshire mansion Thrushcross Grange and an enthusiast of BDSM practices that include canine-themed submission and stuff with chains. This is, obviously, a striking departure from the novel, yet appropriate for an adaptation that arrives with ironic quotation marks around the title. Literary pedants be warned: there is maybe 10 to 15 per cent of the original narrative in the movie, while the rest belongs to Fennell’s reimagined and self-described “fever dream”. It is, at best, Brontë adjacent but with a naff dollop of the Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James. [...]Yes, there is no person or inanimate object safe in a film where Fennell’s main directorial note to Elordi seems to have been, “Great, but can you also lick it?” And so with titter-inducing idiocy this Heathcliff “erotically” licks the wallpaper in Cathy’s bedroom, he licks her cheek when she’s attempting to cry and, worst of all, in a sequence that’s pure David Attenborough, he licks the length of her neck like a gecko working diligently through a string of dried crickets. This, remember, is a character who once dug his dead lover out of the ground with his bare hands (sorry, in the book, not in the film) but here commands only an egregious loss of credibility.Cathy isn’t much better. Robbie is 35 and her age might have been an insurmountable issue had this been a good-faith adaptation (the literary Cathy is a teenager). But here it’s only mildly perplexing, prompting questions about why Cathy only began flirting with Heathcliff in her thirties.More importantly, Robbie is an imposing actress and her costumes, from the designer Jacqueline Durran, are impressive. But her Cathy lives entirely on the surface like Brontë Barbie and never burns from the core like, say, the Cathy of Merle Oberon (from the 1939 version), or like Emma Mackey in the brilliant Emily (2022), there playing Emily Brontë but simultaneously, and this is the point, playing Cathy.The rest of the film is equally imprecise. The production design is ramshackle — a bit of brutalism here, a bit of Tim Burton there, some location shooting and lots of ugly CGI. And the ending is hobbled by a shamefully trite “best bits” megamix.Still, Oliver’s Isabella is a hoot and a bright light. She even winks to the camera as if she’s in on the joke — as if she knows it’s awful. (Kevin Maher)
Emerald Fennell cranks up the campery as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on the windswept Yorkshire moor as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM. Margot Robbie’s Cathy at one stage secretly heads off to the moor for a hilarious bit of self-pleasuring – although, sadly, there are no audaciously intercut scenes of thirst-trap Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, simultaneously doing the same thing in the stable, while muttering gruffly in that Yerrrrrkshire accent of his.This then is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or rather “Wuthering Heights”; the title archly appears in inverted commas, although the postmodern irony seems pointless. Cathy is a primped belle quivering in the presence of Heathcliff, who himself is a moody, long-haired, bearded outsider, as if Scarlett O’Hara were going to melt into the arms of Charles Manson. However, he does get substantially Darcyfied up later on, rocking a shorter and more winsome hairstyle, his gossamer-thin shirt never dry.As a child, young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) is a pert miss, indulged by her roistering old twinkly eyed squire of a dad, in which role Martin Clunes pretty much pinches the whole film. Fennell incidentally abolishes the character of Cathy’s elder brother Hindley from the book (along with his wife and son) reassigning Hindley’s ruinous boozing and gambling to the father; Fennell also, in line with traditional WH adaptation, loses the next-gen second half of the novel, about the grownup children of Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff. She also very feebly erases the issue of Heathcliff’s dark skin – and maybe those inverted commas are intended to shrug off issues of “authenticity”. [...]As for the all-knowing housekeeper Nelly Dean (played by Hong Chau), she is the trickiest figure in the book, the person through whose eyes almost all the action is seen. Nelly is English literature’s uncrowned queen of the unreliable narrators, the deadpan witness-instigator of the central catastrophic misunderstanding that destroys Heathcliff and Cathy’s happiness. Interestingly, Fennell does get Cathy to confront Nelly on this point. At some stage, of course, things get real and a tsunami of tears is uncorked; it’s all in a frantically, exhaustingly Baz Luhrmann-esque style and the movie begins to resemble a 136-minute video for the Charli xcx songs on the soundtrack.Wuthering Heights doesn’t have the live-ammo impact of Fennell’s earlier films Saltburn and Promising Young Woman or, indeed, Andrea Arnold’s flawed, brilliant, primitivist take on Brontë’s novel from 2011, which really did believe in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion. (Peter Bradshaw)
There's no question: This is not the Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë wrote. But Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) never intended that. [...]After all of this, it should surprise no one that Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is radically different from Brontë's. The question is not if the film is faithful to the book, or even better than it. The question is, does this film work on its own terms, as a half-remembered fantasy of wild, enviable romance? And the answer is simply: No. [...]However, despite the familiar framework, the dynamic of Catherine and Heathcliff in Fennell's film feels more like The Princess Bride than Wuthering Heights. For one thing, Heathcliff's cruelty is considerably softened. Like Westley, the sweet stable boy, he will suffer any abuse if it means being close to his blonde ladylove. In particular, Heathcliff will endure a violent whipping from Catherine's father, which gives the boy a chance to prove his immovable dedication to her.Heathcliff's own violence and wrath in adulthood are channeled by Elordi into smoldering and brooding, with a tame frisson of kink, whether he's forcefully gripping Catherine's mouth or later degrading his bride, Edgar's ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) with pet play. Meanwhile, Catherine is a beautiful brat who, in the blink of an eye, goes from a rosy-cheeked child to a picture-perfect doll of a woman. So, of course, Fennell cast Barbie. [...]Brontë fans might clutch their pearls that Fennell has not just a sex scene between Heathcliff and Catherine, but a montage of them, spanning from beds to carriages to the sweeping plains between their estates. And yet, while these scenes have the iconography of classic romance novels — the rich settings, the posh clothes, the forbidden attraction, the beautiful characters on the cover feigning elation — they fall flat. While Robbie is rigorous in bringing Catherine's ire and yearning to life, and Elordi is strong and seething, the pair have all the chemistry of Barbie and Ken dolls bumping rubber when they collide.Perhaps to add Saltburn-like spice, BDSM is worked into various love scenes, bringing horse bridles, shackles, and a metal collar into sex games of degradation. This makes the depravity of the novel more playful than dark. Now, Heathcliff, who comes off like a towering Dom, is less threatening, as his violence is channeled through consensual kink. Yet this depiction of BDSM still feels half-hearted next to more successfully sexy and psychologically provocative films like Babygirl and Pillion. (Kristy Puchko)
Here is where Fennell shot herself in the foot somewhat; if you spend months and months excitedly telling everyone how shocking and sexy and mischievous your film is going to be – adaptation or not, faithful or divergent – you really have to deliver the goods. Wuthering Heights falls short by some margin. While Robbie and Elordi are fine actors in their own right – Elordi a recent, deserved Oscar nominee for his excellent turn in Frankenstein – they feel misjudged as Cathy and Heathcliff, too soft and sympathetic. While Robbie’s sunny countenance never quite clouds into vindictiveness, Elordi’s expressive brown eyes brought humanity to Frankenstein’s Creature but undercut Heathcliff’s brutality, exacerbated by the smoothing down of all his rough edges by Fennell’s script.The bite is gone – we’re warned about his abusive nature but then it’s transformed into a possibly consensual agreement with the poor wretch Isabella Linton. There’s so little time spent building the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff it feels like the only thing they have in common is proximity. Their torrid love affair mostly takes place within a montage set to a Charli XCX song, which gives it all the emotional weight of a perfume advert. These sex scenes – which Fennell and Robbie have giddily teased in interviews – lack sensuality, and despite their best efforts Robbie and Elordi come across as fond co-workers more than star-crossed toxic lovers. The sexiest moment between Cathy and Heathcliff actually occurs when he gets on his knees and sucks on her finger after tearfully professing his love for her. That’s sensual cinema, not a quickie in a carriage or going legs akimbo down the back of the garden.The supporting cast fair no better. Edward Linton (Shazad Latif) is also retooled, now a nice but dull man who lives in a house so antithetical to his sensibilities it’s laughable we’re asked to believe he decorated it in such a manner. His ward Isabella Linton is a simple, spoiled young woman in awe of Cathy until she sets her sights on Heathcliff; Alison Oliver fairs well as the comic relief, though the character’s quick progression from helpless innocent to apparently willing submissive feels like an enormous jump. The standout in the cast is good old Martin Clunes as Cathy’s miserable drunkard father Mr. Earnshaw – a scene where he mocks Heathcliff’s affection for Cathy stands out as a highlight and one of the few instances where the emotional stakes of Wuthering Heights feel sincere. But Fennell can’t help but play his death for laughs, as if the film is allergic to letting anything too grimly tragic linger on screen.In sanding down Heathcliff’s brutality he becomes less complex, reduced to a beautiful sad man with a broad Keighley accent and some billowing shirts. Fennell instead squarely positions Cathy’s maid Nelly (Hong Chau) as the true villain of the saga, a scheming, interfering scold who keeps Cathy and Heathcliff apart out of jealousy and is eventually responsible for the former’s untimely death. Her nuance is also lost in this lavish restaging, written off as the envy of a noble’s daughter born out of wedlock who can’t stand to see Cathy and Heathcliff happy. It’s a thankless role for Chau and absolves Cathy and Heathcliff, essentially writing off their own bad behaviour as little more than childish hair-pulling. (This is now the second film where Fennell has positioned a lower class character as the mastermind of a plot to bring down poor, helpless rich people.)While fidelity to a novel is no guarantee of its success as an adaptation – some of the best adaptations are the most shamelessly unfaithful – one at least hopes that a filmmaker understands the text they’re trying to translate. Perhaps Fennell’s honesty in stating “There’s a version [of ‘Wuthering Heights’] that I remember reading that isn’t quite real, and there are things I wanted to happen that never happened” should be commended, but it’s hard to come out of Wuthering Heights with a sense that Fennell really wanted to reckon with what Brontë’s book is actually about: class, abuse masked as love, generational trauma and the stories we tell ourselves to justify doing bad things and having bad things done to us. All this is stripped away in favour of telling a more straightforward tragic love story – one that has more in common with ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (to the extent Isabella has a monologue recounting the plot of the play) than ‘Wuthering Heights’.So what does Fennell bring to this world? Great gowns, beautiful gowns, by costume legend Jacqueline Durran, that nonetheless feel completely separate from the story being told around them. Suzie Davies’ undeniably impressive production design, particularly in making Thrushcross Grange feel like the Overlook Hotel if it was decorated by Simone Rocha, and one certified Charli XCX ft. John Cale anti-banger in ‘House’ (the rest of the Charli songs used in the film feel intrusive, notably ‘Chains of Love’ over the climactic, yet oddly lacking climax, Cathy and Heathcliff sex montage). Fennell’s eye for detail and ability to assemble a great roster of collaborators is not in dispute; she enthusiastically swings for the fences and there are absolutely striking visuals within Wuthering Heights, as there very much were in Saltburn (also shot by DoP Linus Sandgren). But what good is creating such a beautiful world if it’s so vacant? There is nothing that resonates below the surface here; this is a half-remembered story dressed in a beautiful gown that seems destined for TikTok fan edits and Pinterest mood boards rather than soul-stirring emotional catharsis. We are guided by the hand, instructed on how to feel at every moment, and trusted with nothing. If love cannot exist without trust, why are we doing any of this?A final observation: in anticipation of the film’s release, Fennell programmed a series at the BFI IMAX of titles that inspired her version of Wuthering Heights, including Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard. A veritable bounty of great films that should have been a promising indicator of things to come, but in retrospect only serve as a warning that liking great art doesn’t necessarily result in making great art yourself. Then again, perhaps that’s never been Fennell’s intention. Great art certainly doesn’t sell H+M capsule collections or Kleenex brand collabs. (Hannah Strong)
If Fennell makes Heathcliff somewhat less nefarious, she does the opposite to Catherine, launching her into a passionate and clandestine love affair with Heathcliff without informing him that she is already pregnant with Edgar’s child. The tinkering with Brontë’s plot is sensational yet not substantive, as if Fennell were striking out in a bold new direction only to lose her way, and as the running time lumbers along, this Wuthering Heights deflates.What holds the film aloft along the way are some incisive performances, with Mellington and Cooper ably setting the stage for Robbie and Elordi. (Elordi pulling off Elvis, Frankenstein’s monster, and now Heathcliff in a matter of years counts as an impressive trifecta for an up-and-coming movie star.) Fennell, to her credit, understands the passion and glamour that her leads provide, together and separately, and luxuriates in their tortured romance.Visually, the film offers a banquet, from Linus Sandgren’s cinematography — which captures the Gothic ruins of Wuthering Heights and the wind-swept moors with equal brio — to the costumes by Jacqueline Durran; once Catherine marries into money, her ensembles grow more colorful and elaborate and ridiculous, capturing a perfect Brontë Barbie aesthetic. Production designer Suzie Davies (Conclave) gives Edgar’s palatial Thrushcross Grange a sheen of precision, a dollhouse writ large with its own dollhouse duplicate contained inside, one that provides a sort of commentary on the flesh-and-blood people acting out all around it.Even with all these talented artists putting forth an impressive effort, Fennell continues her journey into lush absurdity. She loves parallel imagery — the welts on Heathcliff’s back and a corset digging into Catherine’s flesh, a white snail spreading its way across a window and Catherine’s wedding train billowing across the landscape — but these echoes ring hollow, calling attention to themselves without revealing deeper meaning. There’s plenty of technique but very little artistry in Fennell’s storytelling; in her efforts to deliver serious cinema, she may be turning into one of this generation’s leading purveyors of camp. (Alonso Duralde)
Fennell indulges a familiar impulse to shock, or at least to jolt us awake. She deploys a heavy-breathing visual and musical style that embraces anachronism and exaggeration at every turn, and she infuses the action with a heightened sexual candor that’s meant to make past tellings of the tale look primly buttoned-up by comparison. (...) In one especially heated sequence, Catherine, overcome with lust, dashes off to the moors and pleasures herself ferociously against the rocks. Along comes Heathcliff, who, aroused by what he sees, lifts the little onanist up by her bodice straps and licks her fingers clean, like someone in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. (...)Fennell, it’s safe to say, has little interest in ephemera; she wants to emblazon her Catherine and Heathcliff on our brains. To that end, she and her collaborators, including the cinematographer Linus Sandgren and the production designer Suzie Davies, paint in the broadest of strokes. They unleash a full-blown stylistic assault roughly halfway through the film, around the time that Catherine becomes mistress of Thrushcross Grange. The hallways take on the gleaming aspect of a fashion runway, and in one room the floor is such a thick, gaudy shade of red that you half expect to find the elevator from “The Shining” around the corner. A dining table overflows with jellied extravagances; I’ve never seen a film with a greater aspic ratio. As for Catherine’s bedchamber, the walls almost qualify as body horror; they match her skin tone perfectly, right down to the blue-vein marbling. If Heathcliff won’t lick them, Hannibal Lecter surely would.I haven’t yet broached the subject of Catherine’s wardrobe, which, courtesy of the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, swells to astonishing and undeniably lovely proportions. One gown mimics the hard shimmer of latex; another looks as crackly and translucent as cellophane. (I won’t forget the cleverly matched images of Catherine dressed for her wedding and, later, a funeral; on both occasions, her veil, whipping in the wind, does nothing to obscure her sorrow.) None of this remotely fits the period, and that is surely the point: Fennell means to present Catherine and Heathcliff’s love story as something transcendent, unfolding beyond the limits of time and history. (...)These are clever visual conceits, and Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel. (Justin Chang)
“Wuthering Heights” strips Brontë’s novel down to its bare bones, throws half of them away, adds some anachronistic Bridgerton-esque multicultural flavoring, and casts what’s left, including any repressed emotions or subtext, in obvious and overwrought terms. (...)“Wuthering Heights” is ultimately an immature reimagining devoid of its source’s nuance and complexity, and at a certain point, its interest in doing its own thing makes one wonder why Fennell didn’t instead craft an original tale unencumbered by expectations or prerequisites. (Nick Schager)
Robbie and Elordi are obviously very attractive people, and with the number of steamy sex scenes shoehorned in, you'd be forgiven for thinking this amounts to palpable chemistry. But it all feels too forced, like a sales bin, smutty romance novel come to life, working too hard to hide the erasure of Brontë's far more complex ideas about the hell of societal convention. (...)Cinematographer Linus Sandgren does capture the tumultuous beauty of the Yorkshire Moors and the stormy atmosphere of the Heights estate, but the production design of Thrushcross Grange is jarringly anachronistic. It becomes a Gothic Barbie Dreamhouse (derogatory), with the costuming, though beautiful, more in keeping with an Alice in Wonderland film. Throw in Charli XCX's pulsating original songs and Anthony Willis's overwhelming score, and you've got a bombastic world that does more to distract than solidify the emotional journey of these iconic literary figures.I don't believe all book-to-screen adaptations need to be carbon copies. And maybe if you haven't read the novel, "Wuthering Heights" will work for you. But I must have read a different book in my teens than Fennell, because her vision obscures my memory of it – as it will for many Wuthering Heights fans out there. (Hanna Ines Flint)
Robbie is wide-eyed and jolly-hockey sticks energetic, Elodri (sic) plays a minor variation on his Frankenstein lunk, and somehow Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) emerges as the main character by default. And don’t even get your hopes up for a Kate Bush needle drop, there’s no ghosts, no supernatural trappings, not even anything Gothic about this Wuthering Heights; a withering review is what this travesty deserves and gets.
. . . going into Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights proves a jarring, vapid, and ultimately insulting experience. [...]Rather than this story being one about generational trauma, which is finally dispelled when the children of these characters find happiness and love together, those descendants from the book are also erased — no Cathy Linton, no Linton Heathcliff, and, saddest of all, no Hareton Earnshaw. If you're unfamiliar with the novel, this narrative takes up almost half of the book. By robbing the story of these characters, this film can no longer be called Wuthering Heights.Even worse, characters like Nelly (Hong Chau), Joseph (Ewan Mitchell), and Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) are completely unrecognizable. Nelly goes from a well-meaning servant and quiet observer to a stifled bastard daughter of a lord who seems to harbor deep hate for Cathy. Joseph is transformed from a religiously violent and evil man into a servant who likes a bit of BDSM and ultimately is just sort of... there. Worst of all, Isabella turns from a naive, innocent without an ounce of cruelty, who is tortured by Heathcliff after their marriage, into a kinky, obsessive, and mean person. To list the amount of betrayals this film has inflicted on the source material would involve recounting the movie scene by scene, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.The most corrupted part of Fennell's Wuthering Heights lies with its core characters. Cathy is, first and foremost, ill-cast with Margot Robbie in the role. Robbie is too old to play the character, and Cathy is less a wild child with a natural arrogance and defiance and more a whiny rich girl who worries about ruining her skirts if she's placed on a tree branch out on the moors. Rather than giving us tension between Cathy and Heathcliff, the film instantly pairs them together, heavy-handed in its reassurance that, at every turn, they are soulmates. This isn't a toxic love; this is two star-crossed lovers separated by circumstance and a poorly used miscommunication trope.Robbie gives a completely unremarkable performance as Cathy, partially because a woman in her twenties might get away with being a brat, but a woman who appears in her mid-thirties is given a lot less slack on that front. The prime example is Oliver's Isabella, who is also a quirky brat, given a pass because she is young and naive — but this version of Cathy is also a poor match for Heathcliff, played by a dull Elordi, who turns the character into a defanged and besotted schoolboy. The two inanely repeat "I love you's" to each other for about half of the movie and quickly consummate their relationship, leading to some truly exhausting sex scenes that overstay their welcome.All of this gives the impression that this isn't Heathcliff and Cathy, but Fennell's imagined romantic version of her own fantasies. Obviously, when a filmmaker takes on an adaptation, it's their prerogative to decide how loyal they wish to be to the source material. Stories that follow the source to the letter might be awful, while adaptations that go far off-book might end up being masterpieces. Many reactions have compared this film to Baz Luhrmann's gorgeous Romeo + Juliet, and while the stylistic decisions might reflect Luhrmann's use of color and modern fashion, his movie follows Shakespeare's play to the letter. Wuthering Heights is a botched mismatch of cobbled-together scenes more than anything else. The point of an adaptation is to keep the soul of the source alive. Scenes can be changed, characters can be combined or removed, but the heart of the story must remain; Wuthering Heights easily proves it is lacking both heart and soul. [...]Atmospherically, Fennell's film tries to imitate that style, but the choices made in production design and costuming are baffling. It's a fever dream of a film, and not in a good way. Excessive use of non-organic textiles like polyester and latex makes the film look cheap. This must have been a creative decision from Fennell, as costume designer Jacqueline Durran has been no stranger to accurate and beautiful period costumes (having won Oscars for Anna Karenina and Little Women). Similarly, production designer Suzie Davis, who has worked on projects like Conclave and Mr. Turner, turns the home of Wuthering Heights into rubble while transforming Thrushcross Grange into a clownish carnival.Don't get me wrong, Wuthering Heights is still a beautiful film. Linus Sandgren's cinematography means every scene pops off the screen. Similarly, Anthony Willis' sweeping score accents the wild moors perfectly (though fewer compliments can be lauded to Charli xcx's contribution). But it's a film that's ultimately hollow, with a bizarre tone that toes the line between surreal and serious. There are purposefully comedic moments that make the story feel almost like a parody, leaning into absurdism, as well as scenes soaked in serious melodrama that weigh everything down. Couple that with the Forever 21 fashion, funhouse sets, and heavy-handed homages to Gone With the Wind, and it's just further proof that this is a soulless adaptation best reserved for Tumblr than the silver screen.While there's a laundry list of mistakes that Fennell makes throughout the film, the largest takeaway is that this is closer to an original story than anything that Emily Brontë ever wrote. Replacing complexity and nuance with melodrama might mask the film enough for those unfamiliar with the book to take it as a romance. Given that it lacks the true substance of the original story — a deep understanding of the racial, societal, and class divides between Heathcliff and the other characters — Wuthering Heights is a waste of two hours of your time. (Therese Lacson)
Everyone becomes embroiled in bitter jealousy and plays cruel emotional games to torture each other. An overtly sensual slant is ostensibly supposed to cement this story in Fennell’s style, but the salaciousness falls short of feeling genuinely provocative. Instances of masturbation, voyeurism, adultery, and BDSM-lite simply lack the smack of taboo. (...)If there’s one rebellious thing in Wuthering Heights, it’s the transfixing costume and production design. The beauty of Cathy’s ensembles only intensifies as the film progresses, a small salve during a bloated 136-minute runtime. Jacqueline Durran—who also dressed Robbie in Barbie and otherwise has ample experience working with period garb—is abstract and playful, opting for bold patterns, unique fabrics, and an unorthodox dismissiveness regarding period accuracy. (...)Overlong and undersexed, Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights betrays her audience of edgelords and perverts. Even stranger, those who have fostered a distaste for the filmmaker’s sensibility will similarly find themselves disappointed. It’s one thing to make art that can be read as indulgent, ill-conceived, and tasteless—it’s another to turn around and make something that’s just boring in comparison. Robbie and Elordi transmit an undeniable chemical connection, but the absence of truly titillating carnal depravity means the film isn’t arousing, just annoying. (Natalia Keogan)
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s performances are almost pushed to the border of pantomime, while Fennell’s provocations seem to define the poor as sexual deviants and the rich as clueless prudes. (...)Fennell, in her script, has conflated Heathcliff’s chief abuser, Hindley, with Cathy’s father Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), and made Cathy and Heathcliff equal targets of his violence. This, in turn, flattens the entire story into that of a poor maiden who escapes her dire circumstances by marrying a wealthy man, Edgar, who loves her but is dull, all while she yearns for her soulmate who has not a penny to his name. When Heathcliff leaves, only to come back rich, it’s presented here as a romcom makeover and not a man’s mission to acquire enough financial power to ruin the lives of everyone he hates.(...)But when faced with Brontë’s own vivid, thorny language, all those fantastical red riding hoods and arm-shaped candle holders look as garish as a live-action Disney film. If there’s an exception, it’s Charli xcx’s and Anthony Willis’s musical contributions, which offer a dread that’s missing from everywhere else. (...)Perhaps there’s a more graceful takeaway from all this. If “Wuthering Heights” were true to the spirit of what it feels like to read Wuthering Heights, at any age, it wouldn’t be a film you could market with brand tie-ins and Valentine’s Day screenings. It would disturb people. So, what is Fennell’s loss is only Brontë’s gain. She remains singular. (Clarisse Loughrey)
World of Reel tries to make an urgent (but incomplete) summary of the published reviews. Forbes does something similar. Rotten Tomatoes is more comprehensive.
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