The latest work from English filmmaker Emerald Fennell — who cultivated a sizable following with her tawdry 2023 dark comedy Saltburn — is a loose adaptation of Emily Bronte’s 1847 Wuthering Heights — loose being a charitable term doing more than its share of heavy lifting — and a reflection of a stark literary crisis plaguing our modern age.
As with any literary adaptation, this new Wuthering Heights must be judged on two fronts: as a stand-alone film and as an interpretation of Bronte’s source material.
Fennell casts Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the ill-fated pair Cathy and Heathcliff. Covering only the first half of the novel — and even then liberally excising characters and developments deemed inconvenient or overly complicated — the film traces their tempestuous relationship from the day Cathy’s father, Earnshaw (Martin Clunes, who delivers the film’s finest performance), brings the orphaned Heathcliff home.
Bronte’s novel is a multifaceted masterpiece that engages questions of class, social hierarchy, and whether moral choice can overcome inheritance and determinism. Fennell sadly saps this rich marrow from Bronte’s work and renders it maladroit, reducing Cathy and Heathcliff to impulse and appetite.
The problem lies in stripping so much of the novel’s architecture — whether to simplify it for contemporary audiences or to indulge the director’s own preoccupations — that the film lacks sufficient substance even as a stand-alone drama. It fails on both fronts. Heathcliff, for example, despite his profound love for Cathy, becomes an irredeemable brute. In the novel, he is loved by his adoptive father yet bullied mercilessly by a covetous brother, a formative dichotomy that frames his later moral choices. The film removes that tension entirely, removing the brother and reimagining Earnshaw as a drunken gambler equally cruel to both children, thereby eliminating the idea that Heathcliff’s turn toward vengeance was an act of will rather than inevitability.
Literature’s power to unsettle and enlarge the mind gives way instead to decorative provocation, its characters flattened into lewd, insipid lovers with the narrative depth of Fifty Shades of Grey. Even Cathy’s pivotal decision to marry Edgar Linton is filtered through Fennell’s relentlessly hormonal lens, her unhappiness conveyed through dull marital intimacy while she retreats into erotic fantasies of being strangled and dominated by Heathcliff.
Take what you will from the fact that the film’s sole redeeming quality is its visual splendor. From sweeping shots of the heather-strewn moors riddled with rugged rock formations shrouded in fog, to the striking costumes and the lacquered red floors of Mr. Linton’s stately Thrushcross Grange, there is no mistaking that Fennell knows how to compose a beautiful image. It is only the marrow that is missing.
It quickly becomes apparent that this “adaptation” (a term I hesitate to employ) is not intended for viewers even vaguely familiar with the source material. Under the flimsy pretext of “interpretation,” Fennell reshapes one of the 19th century’s towering novels into something resembling garish fan fiction, calibrated to complement excessive glugs of cheap pinot grigio.
The choice of Elordi — a tall and quietly charismatic presence — has proven divisive, generating predictable debate about Bronte’s description of Heathcliff as dark-featured and “gypsy.” Such readings lean more on contemporary categories than on the novel’s ambiguity or historical context. Far less attention has been paid to the fact that Edgar Linton, the refined gentleman Cathy marries, is played by a Pakistani actor.
But this is ultimately beside the point. Period pieces do not live or die by the ethnic composition of their casts; diversity is merely one tool a filmmaker may use to immerse viewers in a world or deliberately estrange it. Fennell’s departure from strict textual literalism does not doom the film any more than casting Colin Firth would have guaranteed success (it certainly would not).
RESTORING AMERICA: DOLLAR DOMINANCE, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT
In works where such ambiguity has succeeded — Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) or even the stylized Regency remix of Bridgerton come to mind — it triumphed in spite of those choices, not because of them. The real failing of Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is her eagerness to exhume a handful of famous images and characters from a literary classic and graft them onto adolescent erotic melodrama while expecting to retain the authority of Bronte.
For a faithful adaptation, the two-part 2009 PBS series remains the definitive retelling. For a looser work merely inspired by Wuthering Heights, you would be better served listening to Kate Bush’s 1978 record.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.