Good reviews:
As you’d expect, Elordi and Robbie are beautiful and deliver. But the script leaves some disconnects in the story itself that all of their star power can't completely overcome.
The stripped-down adaptation doesn’t give us enough of a sense of the characters. Cathy is supposed to be headstrong and untamable until she is given a quick look at refinement by the Linton family. But we don't see enough of how far that wildness goes in her to give us a sense of what's going on beneath the surface. There’s no real context for why she says something so cruel to Nelly.
Nelly’s role is underdeveloped so we have limited insight into her years-long processing of the insult. Healthcliff is meant to be unrefined and emotionally dysregulated with a simmering desire for revenge. But in this adaptation what we see is a man in control of himself.
To be fair, Fennell quite successfully uses the environment to give us a sense of some of the emotions. She has a vision for the world in which the characters move. Her film conjures a world of sensuality, where the corsets keep humans buttoned up, contrasted with the raw nature, the moors, the rain, the waves crashing, representing the uncontrollable nature of desire.
It's a visceral reminder that love of this intensity is a force of nature that pushes against the human will. When it is unleashed like this, it can't be contained. How can Cathy and Heathcliff resist when the natural world is pulsing all around them, mirroring their internal desires? These elements give the film a wonderful atmosphere.
Fennell has chosen to leave off the last quarter of the book, to focus on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff.
And while she's warned us that this isn't a definitive version, it arguably removes the mystical element that makes the book so powerful, and changes the nature of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. For many fans of the book, what makes it enduring is Cathy's ghost walking the moors, haunting Heathcliff who yearns to be with her. It speaks to the idea of soulmates, whose love is so powerful that not even death can separate them.
With that gone, the movie made me wonder why these two unconventional people, whose passion is so extreme, don’t behave in an unconventional way.
They're more modern than the Linton family, and deeply in love. So why don’t they just get on Heathcliff’s horse and ride off into the sunset together? (Karen Gordon)
Fennell knows how to compose a shot, make her actors looks exactly as desirable or deplorable as she requires, and make the landscape surrounding her performers appear vast, foreboding, even threatening. The costumes in Wuthering Heights are award worthy, and I had no real issues with the performances. My greatest hesitation about the movie is the nasty tone that asks us to empathize with terrible human beings. I certainly don’t have issues with having unlikable characters at the center of certain films, but the filmmaker still has to invite me into this place where they want me to spend more than two hours. The emotional volatility is a great deal of clanging and rattling with nothing to show for it in the end. I wanted any type of connection from a movie that seemed more interested in pushing us away. (Steve Prokopy)
Some people consider Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” not just a great romance novel but THE great romance novel, against which every love story is measured. So director-writer Emerald Fennell has her work cut out for her as she attempts to fashion a steamy, sensual movie out of it.
Fennell, who gave us plenty to chew on in “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” has the building blocks to adapt a cracking version of “Wuthering Heights.” Those include windswept moors for locations, a sumptuous visual palette, gorgeous costumes and two leads — Margot Robbie as the flighty Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as the darkly brooding Heathcliff — who don’t just fill out those costumes but inhabit their legendary characters.
It’s not always smooth sailing for Robbie and Elordi, because the characters’ moods and motivations flit from one extreme to the other over the course of more than two hours. Both Cathy and Heathcliff swear their love to each other, but they also behave in the most beastly ways to each other and to anyone who comes into their orbit. They are, by turn, both the moth and the flame for each other, and they and others get burned.
Heathcliff starts out as an orphan, taken in by Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), who has squandered his fortune on gambling and strong drink. Cathy gives Heathcliff his name and, at first, treats him as a pet — but over time they grow into friendship. This stirs jealousy in Nellie, who lives in the Earnshaw’s home, called Wuthering Heights, and as an adult (played by Hong Chau) becomes Cathy’s paid companion.
Cathy and Heathcliff always seem on the verge of expressing their love for each other, but society pressures and occasional external events get in the way. One such event is the arrival of new neighbors, wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his barely-adult ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). Cathy is cajoled to think about marrying Edgar, because of his wealth, and abandon the idea of marrying Heathcliff. When Heathcliff overhears Cathy talking about Edgar, it drives him to a desperate decision.
Fennell’s script leans heavily into Brontë’s creaky plot mechanics — there’s a lot of things overheard, or attempts at communication thwarted by third parties — that border on silliness. Where the movie is more sure of itself is when Robbie’s Cathy and Elordi’s Heathcliff are together, getting soaked in the English rain or making out in various settings.
People who watch this “Wuthering Heights” may argue online from here to doomsday about whether Robbie and Elordi have any romantic chemistry here. That’s in the eye of the beholder, really — but it’s clear they are hungry to fulfill Fennell’s sometimes contradictory impulses to capture Brontë’s 19th century moodiness while also working over the classic story into something more current and alive. (Sean P. Means)
Fans of Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights should be aware that this isn’t a faithful retelling. Visually, tonally, and narratively, this adaptation plays by its own set of rules — it ditches key characters and intergenerational subplots. Fennell’s take on the material focuses squarely on the complicated relationship between the film’s two leads, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). [...]
Three movies into her filmography, and Fennell has established an unmistakable cinematic voice. In terms of aesthetic and tone, “Wuthering Heights” feels closer to Saltburn than Promising Young Woman. It’s racy and joyfully seductive with a winking trashiness. The film opens with people gawking at a corpse’s erect “junk,” and it only amps the WTF-factor from there. I could go on and on about floors made to resemble spilled blood and bedroom walls designed to mimic human skin (with veins and freckles).
Beyond the dreamlogic visuals, “Wuthering Heights” also carries Fennell’s thematic sensibilities too. It’s a story about money, status, and people navigating the politics of class structures. There’s a particular emphasis on gender roles, and the struggle of women to claim their self-agency in a world of domineering (and often daft) men.
Fennell packs plenty to chew on into every scene. But you can also sit back, turn off your analytical brain and just soak up the sumptuous costumes and production design while Anthony Willis’s catchy score washes over you. [...]
Audiences will no doubt watch this film and melt over the steamy sex scenes, and by all means, do your thing. But “Wuthering Heights” also reads as a cautionary tale, celebrating the miracle of love by exposing how fragile and fleeting it truly is. Some romances aren’t doomed by fate; they are murdered by pride. (Victor Stiff)
Lukewarm reviews:
Euronews Culture picks it as the film of the week but describes it as ' A horny and vapid take on Brontë's classic'.
Director Emerald Fennell guts one of the most emotionally violent novels ever written for a surface-level flirtation with corset kink that's as vapid as it is bafflingly tame.
Nearly 180 years after its publication, Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel “Wuthering Heights” gets a revamp from Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn), whose film has been extensively marketed as a fresh, heavily stylised and sexually charged version of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s tumultuous relationship.
With inverted commas to boot.
It starts off promisingly enough, with a hanged man with a visible erection, while a young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) looks on. This could have been an early indicator that Fennell is keen to explore the Eros / Thanatos of it all - how life and death instincts are intertwined and can lead to self-destructive behaviours, especially when it comes to matters of the heart and sexual yearnings. But why bother with such trivial things when you can settle for an increasingly jarring tone that sits somewhere between comically surreal and serious?
We then see how Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes) brings home a street urchin (Owen Cooper), whom she quickly claims as her “pet”. [...]
There’s every reason to celebrate a filmmaker doing something different with a source material that has been adapted countless times on both small and big screens.
Sure, streamlining the narrative, ditching half the characters and whitewashing your main character are questionable choices – and ones made before, especially when you look at the roster of actors who have been cast as Heathcliff in the past. But those quotations marks in the title should warn audiences from the get-go: this is Fennell’s version and she can do what she pleases, no matter how anti-academic it is. The filmmaker has openly said that she wanted to make a movie that captured how Brontë’s novel made her feel the first time she read it, aged 14. More power to her and literary purists be damned.
However, if you’re going to ditch the race component, strip away the class commentary and not bother with themes of intergenerational trauma inherent to the text, all in favour of selling your film as bold, sexy and provocative, your version better swing for the fences when it comes to that trifecta. Depressingly, “Wuthering Heights” is so astonishingly dull and tame that you’ll wonder what all the giddy hype was about.
Fennell can’t crank up the thirstiness, campery and strangeness - only paid lip service through some bold decor choices – and doesn’t bring any genuine frisson to simmering sexual awakenings or lustful repression.
She settles for having two genetically blessed actors – Margot Robbie doing her best Hermione Granger impression and Jacob Elordi as smoldering scaffolding – instantly paired together and have them getting caught in the rain. A LOT. Beyond that, there’s no palpable sense of longing and anticipation that could make a room suddenly feel suffocating, and Fennell ends up reducing the torrid attraction to some runny egg textures, repeated finger sucking and a carriage quickie. Had we gotten more of Cathy’s lustful stirrings triggered by her peeping on a mild BDSM encounter, the pent-up lust and the thrill of yearning would have seemed less like a transparent bid to promote a BookTok fan fiction that’s not a million miles away from E.L. James.
In their defense, both Robbie and Elordi do manage to conjure some chemistry - but no tension, chiefly because their characters are in close proximity from the get-go and you don’t relate to them in any way. These are two people for whom you should feel something for – both sympathy and hatred for the way their complex and conflicting desires stem from deep-seated trauma and self-perpetuating cycles of abuse.
Granted, Martin Clunes’s paternal figure is clearly meant to act as both the inebriated gambler and Heathcliff’s abuser, who in the novel was Cathy’s brother Hindley (absent here); but he comes off as a hapless drunk more than a figure which inspires fear and resentment. It doesn’t feel like enough to feed Heathcliff’s thirst for revenge and by extension his cruel nature, nor enough to justify this snobbishly bratty version of Cathy.
When you remove the very backstories that make the doomed lovers such fascinatingly contradictory protagonists in the first place, what you’re left with are two shallow smokeshows whose tiresome push and pull will make you wish you were watching Cruel Intentions instead.
Now there was a raunchy adaptation that actually took some risks, with a director that understood the source material.
As it is, “Wuthering Heights” is less “I hated you, I loved you, too” and more “Um ah, I don’t know, maybe, just look at me in a blood-red PVC dress that would make Baz Luhrman’s shorts tighten”.
Speaking of which, kudos to Jacqueline Durran and Suzie Davies, whose maximalist costumes and audaious production design are the film's main redemptive qualities. Fennell wanted striking stylistic choices, and they understood the assignment. It’s hardly their fault that the director couldn’t tease any substance from their heightened aesthetic and only wanted a Charli XCX-scored social media showreel.
Another redeeming shout-out must go to Alison Oliver, who stands out as Edgar’s ward, the prudish Isabella Linton. But once again, Fennell bundles it. As terrific as Oliver is as comic relief, the director makes the giant jump from having her character go from blushing ingenue to willing sub in a matter of minutes. While the dynamic between Heathcliff and Isabella could have been provocative and unsettling, it ends up played – like so many promising moments - as hollow parody. [...]
It didn’t have to be subtle, nor faithful to its literary source; but when the end result guts one of the most emotionally violent novels ever written for a surface-level flirtation with corset kink which has all the weight and depth of a half-arsed lingerie advert, there’s every reason to bemoan a lack of subversiveness, sensuality and heart.
As it is, purists are much better off seeking out Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version and teens hankering for a dose of destructive codependence courtesy of two sexually charged messy bitches should rush to discover Cruel Intentions. The soundtrack’s better in that one too. (David Mouriquand)
Part of the issue is physicality. Heathcliff is often imagined as dark, brooding, almost elemental – a man forged by humiliation and rage. Elordi brings brooding, yes, but not the volcanic menace the role demands. Robbie’s Catherine, meanwhile, carries elegance and self-awareness where wild contradiction should reign.
Narratively, the film often feels like a reworking of Romeo and Juliet – but transplanted onto the moors of Wuthering Heights.
There is the class divide between Catherine and Heathcliff. There is the meddling voice of practicality. Nelly, much like Juliet’s nurse, becomes the advocate of safety and social survival. She nudges Catherine toward the wealthy Edgar, only, she has more selfish reasons to do this.
Indeed, this emphasis on social structure over psychological obsession shifts the centre of gravity. Brontë’s novel is less about star-crossed lovers and more about destructive possession. Fennell’s version leans into the romance – and occasionally softens the brutality that makes the original so unsettling. [...]
After Catherine’s wedding to Edgar, the film’s tone shifts to brighter colours, imbuing the audience with a giddy summer fever, complete with songs by British pop singer Charli XCX. Yes, this is a reimagining but would Brontë approve or would she be rolling in her grave? Probably the latter.
Still, there are moments when the film soars. Certain frames are breathtaking – Catherine standing against a bruised sky, Heathcliff emerging from shadow like a spectre of unfinished grief. In these instances, Fennell captures the aching, ghostly quality that has kept “Wuthering Heights” alive for generations.
So, was this reimagining necessary? Perhaps not. Does it work? In parts.
It is a film of striking images and bold intentions, hampered by uneven casting, sluggish pacing, and a weaker story than the original masterpiece. “Wuthering Heights” does not fully unleash the savage heart of Brontë’s story – but it offers, albeit fleetingly, glimpses of the original. (Dinesh Kumar Maganathan)
What she can’t do, however, is make the two lead characters compelling. Cathy is a striver who never seems to know what she wants out of life, and Heathcliff goes from a bore to a brute over the course of the film, with no clear indication that he likes anybody, much less Cathy. Anyone expecting some kind of grand romance will be disappointed as Fennell is much more interested in making the film weird, like having the walls of Cathy’s room look like her skin, complete with freckles.
Robbie and Elordi do well enough with the material, and it’s clear that both of them are committed to bringing Fennell’s vision to life. Their styles tend to balance each other out, and if the story had been committed to their characters’ relationship, they might be lauded for their chemistry. In the end, though, the supporting actors feel more interesting, including ones played by Hong Chau, Alison Miller, and Clunes.
This version of Wuthering Heights should never be construed as an alternative to reading the book for any high schoolers out there. While Fennell makes the film interesting with her technical filmmaking choices, the story never finds its footing as it fails to sell the one thing that it seems to promise. (Alex Bentley)
C- from
In Session Film, which, overall, considers it 'Merely an Exercise in Shock Value'.
Yes, the first act is a provocative setup intended to create cognitive dissonance. The young orphan continues to take beatings for Catherine, even when he had nothing to do with them. Years later, Catherine (Margot Robbie) is married, but has an affair with Heathcliff (Frankenstein’s Jacob Elorbi) when he returns years later. Here, it is interesting to see Catherine treated like a doll, a piece of property, but you can easily see how Heathcliff was treated as a “pet” and as property of the Earnshaw estate.
When the film shifts into adulthood, the emotional wounds feel generational, like rocks forming on the bed of a rushing river. This is used to intensify the romance, a toxic passion that frames trauma as an aesthetic. Still, you cannot deny the exceptional chemistry between Robbie and Elorbi, in the way that two beautiful, horny people have when they hardly have the choice of free will in their own lives.
However, without that emotional connection that forms the bond, there is no reason to believe there is a deeper connection beyond the physical. That is an insult to Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic work. This Wuthering Heights withers under a leering eye instead of a symbiotic one, forgetting the genuine intimacy underneath all the feral intensity. (M.N. Miller)
Bad reviews:
It's meant to be a pointed reference — a nod by Fennell to the fact that this is not a normal adaptation. Instead, it's a re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn director had reading the book as a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old. The result is a dreamlike, visually stunning — if emotionally stunted — re-interpretation of the doomed love between brooding, hunky orphan Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and the beautiful, mercurial estate master's daughter, Catherine (Margot Robbie).
Which would be an impressive swing if the changes to the source material were written with any intention of reinventing the story for modern day, instead of — at best — misreading what the book was trying to say, or, at worst, turning Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" into something that isn't Wuthering Heights at all.
Sadly, it often feels like the latter. Like in many of Fennell's other works (anyone heard of her Bad Cinderella Broadway adaptation?) she seems less interested in translating Brontë's story than in performing hollow provocation with it. For example, the rumour is also true that the movie begins the way you've heard: A nameless man has been hanged in a town square, as children point and laugh at a certain … visibly swollen appendage, and a group of onlookers excitedly gyrate below him.
Fans of the actual Wuthering Heights are free to scratch their heads at this point, given that nothing even approximating this scene crops up in the book's opening pages. Though if scratching is your default response to baffling left-field narrative turns, you may want to make sure your nails are trimmed. If not, watching Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" will likely lead to a brain injury. [...]
He goes from a sociopathic monster who dreams about murdering infants and painting houses with blood into a swoon-inducing object of desire. Fennell turns him into an infinitely immature depiction of an "I can fix him" hero who towers over ahistorical costumes and set design more reminiscent of Tim Burton than Britain.
From that, she turns a Romantic era-influenced story, itself in no way a romance, into something closer to Pride and Prejudice meets Fifty Shades of Grey. As a filmic oddity, it does make for an interesting invention. But stylized to the point of camp, it doesn't make a good movie. (Jackson Weaver)
For a film that was marketed as being sexually provocative and freaky, Wuthering Heights barely has any memorable scenes that establish Catherine and Heathcliff’s sexual chemistry. The scene in which Catherine fantasises about Heathcliff, cross-cut with dough being aggressively slapped against a kitchen counter, is straight out of a TikTok thirst trap.
Her visions of his bare, scarred back aim for tortured sensuality but land as hollow aesthetic posturing. Even so, Catherine acts so coy and disinterested around Heathcliff that you wish she would—at least once—own her desire without disguising it as indifference.
In all fairness, the film does some things right. The motif of self-harm is surprisingly resonant. Catherine slaps herself in the mirror and, at one point, compels Nelly to cinch her corset unbearably tight—a deliberate act of self-inflicted punishment.
The final act of the film—the part where Catherine breathes her last and loses her baby—is emotionally affecting even if its intensity is undermined by the film’s earlier tonal flippancy.
I wouldn’t want to dignify the absolutely bizarre arc where Heathcliff torments his wife Isabella (Alison Oliver) with an analysis. It is truly one of the most absurd things I have seen on-screen—one which doesn’t serve any larger purpose nor does it add stylistically to the narrative.
In film studies, adaptation theory argues that a film can either closely transfer most details of the source text or the original source can serve as loose inspiration.
Fennell’s film somehow attempts all of it and yet achieves none of it. It doesn’t complicate the themes and anxieties of the source text but instead diminishes them to the point that the film barely functions as an adaptation.
Despite its fleeting moments of competence, Wuthering Heights is laughably bad. It is Wattpad fanfiction that should have never left the website’s confines, much less made into a full-length feature film.
The soundtrack, drawn from Charli XCX’s new album of the film's name, does little to deepen or meaningfully complicate the narrative’s tonal register. As a die-hard Charli XCX stan who practically evangelises ‘Brat’, even I find it hard to defend the popstar here.
If the many adaptations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights formed a highway, Fennell’s film would be less a pit-stop, more a jarring pothole—one that threatens to derail the entire journey toward a definitive adaptation.
In trying to modernise a classic, the film forgets the one thing that made it endure: emotional truth. (Deepansh Duggal)
Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" then positions itself as a power play of sorts, with Cathy and Heathcliff trying to make each other realize what they are missing out on. Through Fennell's lens, the movie becomes "Fifty Shades of Grey" with a dash of Brontë, which on paper sounds fun and sexy, but as a movie it plays rather stagnantly. As a viewer it's easy to get caught up in the windswept hills and the beautifully photographed rainstorms, or entranced by Jacqueline Durran's costumes; it's just a shame the movie is a bore.
Elordi (currently Oscar-nominated for "Frankenstein") and Robbie are two attractive movie stars, but "Wuthering Heights" should be carried by their passion, and there isn't a spark to sustain its 140-minute runtime. Their performances play like exaggerated types, with a heavy emphasis on Heathcliff's brooding persona. It all falls flat underneath the pretty surface.
There is a lot of curiosity and skepticism surrounding "Wuthering Heights," which alone will drive box office sales over its opening weekend. Whether audiences arrive at the movies with deep knowledge of Brontë's work, or having flipped through the Sparks Notes just to be able to write that paper in high school, "Wuthering Heights" will spark some discussion. It may elicit a few yawns as well. (Matthew Passantino)
Fennell’s misinterpretation of Brontë’s mythic love story also betrays Kate Bush’s traditionalist, non-feminist genius and deliberately assaults the novel’s status, implying, as in Saltburn, a critique of the British Empire’s toxic, colonialist dysfunction. It’s an apt tribute to Millennial decadence. (Armond White)
Spanish film critic Carlos Boyero said he hadn't liked it on
Cadena Ser.
Boyero tampoco compra la pareja protagonista. "Aquí no hay química entre ellos", asegura sobre Margot Robbie y Jacob Elordi. Aunque reconoce el esfuerzo interpretativo y el despliegue visual, siente que la emoción está subrayada de forma excesiva. "Detesto la billetera constante de pianos y violines. Si quieren transmitir emoción, pueden hacerlo de otras formas".
El resultado, dice, es paradójico: una historia pensada para sacudir al espectador que le deja completamente frío. "Con una historia tan volcánica, a mí no se me ha alterado nada el corazón". Ni siquiera el desgarro de Catherine logra convencerle: "Aunque haya mucho desgarro, pienso que no deben quererse tanto. No me ha conmovido".
(Sara M. Santelli) (Translation)
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