A messy, occasionally irresistible adaptation. (...)
The result is something that isn’t “Wuthering Heights,” but is sort of “Wuthering Heights”-adjacent: two extremely melodramatic (and very good-looking) people flinging themselves toward and away from each other, under some very threatening-looking skies. And, despite all the wall-licking and erotic bread-kneading and leeches and extremely fetishized raw eggs (Fennell is, shall we say, not a particularly subtle filmmaker), it has its moments. When Heathcliff breathily tells a swooning Catherine, “Kiss me, and let us both be damned,” out on those otherworldly moors, it’s the kind of larger-than-life moment that movies are made for. This “Wuthering Heights” is a mess, but an occasionally irresistible one. (Moira MacDonald)
The movie’s biggest strength is that it’s not too deep. It's visually stunning but is ultimately empty calories. Two of Hollywood’s hottest stars, both in terms of fame and attractiveness, are frolicking in the English countryside, arguing in palatial mansions and hooking up passionately in the rain. You could sell the movie on Robbie’s ability to cry beautifully and Elordi's towering dominance, and Fennell kind of does.
Using 35mm VistaVision cameras to create dreamy and harrowing shots, Fennell taps into her great visual eye and allows beauty and pining to be the center of her adaptation. (Amanda Luberto)
Emily Brontë Is Rolling In Her Grave — But Watch This AO3 Fanfiction Anyway.
A sexy, wind-swept rewrite that forgets the novel’s bite but delivers swoony cinematic heat (...)
Perhaps this version will resonate with viewers encountering the story for the first time. Perhaps it will ignite renewed interest in Brontë’s text. Adaptations need not replicate; they can reinterpret, critique, modernise. Fidelity is not the only measure of success.
But Wuthering Heights is not simply a love story that can be extracted from its socio-political soil without consequence. It is a novel about poverty, power, racialisation, and the way love can blur into possession. Strip away those layers, and what remains is visually sumptuous but philosophically thin.
Emily Brontë wrote a book that refuses domestication. It is structurally fragmented, morally ambiguous, resistant to comfort. This adaptation dresses it in silk and candlelight, frames it in golden-hour splendour, and lets the wind howl through exquisitely designed sets.
The wind still rages. I only wish the story had been allowed to do the same. But this deserves a watch on the big screen. (Ekta SInha)
This is a saucier adaptation of Wuthering Heights than has been made before. Though I prefer Emily (2022), whether you’ll like this will depend on whether you can look past the changes from the book (of which half is missing) and enjoy the romance despite the chaos they bring to everyone else. One thing is for certain – they won’t be showing this version in schools. (Sunny Ramgolam)
Sex,sex and more sex. (...)
If Ms Fennell wants to make a sexed-up version of “Wuthering Heights”, that is her prerogative. None of it will surprise anyone who has seen her previous films, “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”, both of which touch on the dark side of desire. David Thomson, a film historian, says Ms Fennell’s work has “got a real sense of sensuality, sexuality, danger” and a “kind of recklessness” in its willingness to take risks. Her fans may appreciate her boldness, not to mention the sumptuous costumes and occasional jokes.
Devotees of the novel, however, will be dismayed that Brontë’s tale of class, obsession and violence has been so distorted. Many will believe that she has desecrated the book and hollowed out its characters. Luckily, purists can turn on one of many other, more faithful adaptations.
They should also bear in mind the wry observation of James Cain, an American novelist and journalist whose work was the basis for “Double Indemnity”, among other films. “People tell me, ‘Don’t you care what they’ve done to your books?’ I tell them, ‘They haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.’”
If Czech filmmakers Věra Chytilová or Jan Švankmajer ever adapted the work of the Brontë sisters it might look something like 2026’s Wuthering Heights, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. (...)
Like all the excess grotesquerie on display, this take on Wuthering Heights isn’t flawless, but it is so packed with provocation and craft that it demands to be seen. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography finds stark beauty in the mud and decay of rural Yorkshire locations, while Anthony Willis’ sweeping score lends the film an ironic romantic grandeur. The magnificent costumes and set design—that flesh-colored wall is a stunner—give the film a tactile, almost nauseating physicality and all but guarantee attention during next year’s awards season.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights may repel as many viewers as it enthralls, but that juxtaposition feels entirely intentional. By dragging Emily Brontë’s story through filth, flesh, and desire, the film strips away centuries of romantic varnish to reveal something far more unsettling underneath. It doesn’t replace the novel so much as interrogate it—and while its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, this is a bold, abrasive, and often mesmerizing act of desecration perfect for Valentine’s Day, 2026. (Jason Pirodsky)
Si el objetivo de ver Cumbres borrascosas en pantalla gigante pasa por celebrar cada plano ostentoso o cada hermoso vestido que Robbie porta como si fuera modelo de un catálogo de modas entonces la experiencia valdrá la pena, pero como ejercicio erótico y sobre todo como melodrama romántico realmente intenso, conmovedor y desgarrador el resultado está lejos de ser convincente. (Diego Batlle) (Translation)
Con Cumbres Borrascosas, Emerald Fennell deja de lado la reverencia al texto original para ofrecer una adaptación que responde más a su propia sensibilidad autoral que a la tradición literaria. Es una propuesta arriesgada y, por momentos, irregular, pero también apasionada y visualmente potente. Si en Saltburn la obsesión se expresaba a través del exceso, aquí se canaliza mediante la estilización y la emotividad. El resultado es una versión distinta, provocadora y decididamente contemporánea de un clásico eterno. (Laia Cabuli) (Translation)
Emily Brontë's classic is remodelled as a schlocky bodice-ripper.
This lurid reworking is designed to deliver shocks, mad frocks and a porny eroticism (...)
But the famous main characters are two-dimensional cartoon characters (it’s tempting to say, a mock-gothic Barbie and Ken with real genitalia), driven on by the film’s bizarrely split vision. Are they in a legendary tragic story of undying love? Sort of. Is this a knockabout bit of kitsch, complete with lush Charlie XCX balladry, a black comedy vibe and a puerile desire to shock? Hell, yes.
Kitsch doesn’t sit well with tragedy, though, because it is a closed system that's there to be looked at, not understood, and definitely not to be empathised with. So it’s no good protesting that the film is nothing like the book, as I would guess it never set out to be. (Try Andrea Arnold’s raw no-budget version for an honest attempt at adaptation that doesn’t infringe the Trades Description Act.) Fennell’s is sui generis but, as such, a misfire. (Helen Hawkins)
"Wuthering Heights" Tears Up The Text. Emerald Fennell’s latest film butchers Brontë and plays with the blood. (...)
Slick, sultry, and superficial. All accurate descriptors of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. But as the scare quotes underpinning this take on Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel suggest, it’s less of an adaptation and more of a loose interpretation of its lingering, haunting impact on our cultural zeitgeist. Though its unfettered gutting of key characters, plot points, and nuances occasionally render it terribly hollow and unsubtle, such seemingly negative qualities manifest as strengths in a scattershot film that boldly ensnares and titillates our senses. (...)
Its sheer disregard for its source material gives way to an experience that’s undeniably cathartic in its comedic and sexual release. While Fennell’s film could have shamelessly indulged in its worst tendencies a tad more, as it pulls punches in its more traditionally inclined closing act, it threatens to make us as lovesick as its bruised protagonists and the tortured synths pervading Charli XCX’s soundtrack. Sure, it butchers Brontë, but it’s too much fun watching it play with the blood. (Prabhjot Bains)
‘Wuthering Heights’ Reaches the Horniest of Heights
And it’s up to you, dear viewer, if that horniness is a good thing. (...)
I have no qualms with directors adapting their favorite novels, and I certainly don’t object to Fennell giving us two hours of softcore Gothic porn. However, it feels as if she’s just stolen Brontë’s main characters and slapped the Wuthering Heights title onto a steamy romance of her own making. Fennell skims over the more sensitive themes of social class, poverty, revenge, and intergenerational trauma in favor of some sexy time between Heathcliff, Catherine, and, honestly, quite a few of the other characters (prepare yourself to see Alison Oliver sporting a metal collar and going, “Woof, woof.”). Wuthering Heights is definitely a visual feast for Fennell, but unfortunately, it’s not saying much. (Mel Wang)
Not Fully Fennell… Or At All Feral (...)
The film’s attitude towards sex is invigorating, at times, while also feeling a little shallow. What is the connection between death and arousal? What does it mean to have power? Who has it? Fennell poses these questions without committing to answering them, leaving us with no more than a finger in a fish, a mess of eggs. (Jade Hayden)
Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, and their costars are the only things keeping this film from drowning in its own decadence. (...)
The book has 34 chapters. But as William Wyler did in 1939 with his adaptation, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier (one of many White actors to be cast as Heathcliff, and who would later play Othello in blackface), Fennell decided to end her movie at the novel’s halfway point, essentially leaving what book lovers might argue is the best part of the story untold.
But then, that’s what adaptations can do—take an old story and meld it into something new, something that speaks to the current moment or sheds light on the past. Only, Fennell’s storytelling doesn’t speak to much of anything. (Sarah Marloff)
Emily Brontë got it all wrong. A novel intricately tracing the story of two families over several generations, told by multiple narrators, in a complexly interlocking time scheme? Lovers who never consummate their relationship? A hero who is explicitly evil, a nightmare of cruelty and vindictiveness? That will never do. Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) has fixed all these mistakes.
As in most adaptations of Wuthering Heights, she has omitted the entire story of the second generation in this family saga, including the ruination of Cathy Earnshaw’s brother, Hindley, and the marriages of her daughter, Cathy Linton, first to Linton Heathcliff and then to Hareton Earnshaw. Whereas other adaptations just stop tactfully short of these complications, Fennell has radically altered the story to abolish them.
Cathy here has no brother. It is her father (blustering Martin Clunes) who ruins himself with drink. So that’s one tricky element redacted. Cathy doesn’t have a child with her husband, Edgar Linton; she instead dies of sepsis after a miscarriage. Another poser dodged. And no sex? We are treated to a montage of Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) shagging all over the place, inside and out, on the moors, in her weird pink bedroom, in a fairy-tale carriage. No explanation is given of why Edgar (Shazad Latif), hasn’t noticed. So that’s Emily told. Relying on this film to skip the book will get students in deep trouble. (David Sexton)
It’s all undeniably gorgeous, but distractingly so. There are multiple scenes – well, “scenes” seems overly generous – that are little more than excuses for Robbie to wear yet another fancy frock. In an era when scripts are being written for viewers to absorb in between doomscrolling sessions, “Wuthering Heights” is filmed in order to fill endless Vogue photospreads. For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler. (Richard Whittaker)
En resumidas cuentas, esta nueva Cumbres borrascosas parece una digna hija de su tiempo: es corta de miras, sexy, muy morbosa y trágica hasta rozar la ridiculez.
Toda su imaginación está puesta al servicio de la estética y la perturbación sin que medie la más mínima posibilidad de leer entre líneas o hacer un esfuerzo intelectual en ningún momento. Hasta las traiciones más brutales parecen ser un engranaje sistemático que aboca a un final predecible.
(Raquel Hernández Luján) (Translation)
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