Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, narrows down Emily Brontë’s feverish tale of destructive love and class divides to its feral core of obsession and revenge
Love can be annihilation as easily as it can be salvation. This is precisely what British writer Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) taught us. The gothic novel, centred on the intense, toxic, and destructive love between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff on England’s Yorkshire moors, is a tale of obsessive love, betrayal, and generational revenge, in which Heathcliff brutally ruins the lives of the Earnshaw and Linton families after Catherine chooses to marry his gentler counter foil. The novel, in which love is indistinguishable from pride, and pride from cruelty, has inspired filmmakers across time, beginning with the 1920 silent film, directed by A.V. Bramble, to William Wyler’s 1939 black-and-white adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 bolder take.
Emerald Fennell, fresh off the indulgences of Saltburn (2023) — a dark, gothic psychological thriller exploring obsession, class, and desire, which follows Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he becomes infatuated with his wealthy, aristocratic classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) — delivers her own audacious interpretation, which is being pilloried and praised in extreme terms. Starring Margot Robbie (Barbie, Babylon, Amsterdam) as the willful Catherine Earnshaw and Elordi as the brooding Heathcliff, this 136-minute Warner Bros. production premieres just in time for Valentine’s Day. A gut-punch exploration of love gone feral, it feels oddly relevant at a time when there seems to be no end to the stories involving crimes of passion.
Published in 1847 (when Emily Brontë was just 27) under the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell, the novel came out in a Victorian culture deeply suspicious of female ambition. Even Charlotte Brontë had been warned that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Much to the chagrin of the arbiters of the time’s literary taste, Emily’s book defied every expectation of what a woman’s novel should be. There is nothing decorous about Heathcliff and Catherine’s ferocious bond; nothing reassuring about the moral universe they inhabit.
Love in Wuthering Heights is a force that collapses the boundaries between self and other, life and death. Raised in the isolation of the Haworth parsonage, fronting a graveyard and backed by the Yorkshire moors, Emily grew up in circumstances that were both cloistered and imaginatively fertile. The early deaths of her mother and sisters, the peculiar habits of her father, and the siblings’ intense inward life — expressed through the elaborate fantasy worlds of Angria and Gondal — shaped a writer attuned to extremity. Cut off from society and wary of its judgments, the Brontë sisters wrote into being stories of passion and rebellion.
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When the novel was republished in 1850 under Emily’s real name, she was already gone, having died at 30 after refusing medical treatment almost to the end. That proximity to death, and perhaps a certain acceptance of it, informs Wuthering Heights. The novel’s atmosphere is saturated with haunting, not just in the famous apparition at the window, but in its insistence that the past never loosens its grip. If Victorian fiction often sought moral clarity, Emily Brontë offered a vision of human feeling as a storm or as something that outlives the body. Nearly two centuries on, Wuthering Heights remains a singular achievement.
A fever-dream reinterpretation
Fennell adheres loosely to Brontë’s narrative framework, focusing primarily on the first generation of doomed souls while jettisoning much of the novel’s multigenerational sprawl. In late 18th-century Yorkshire, a nameless orphan boy — later christened Heathcliff (played as a youth by Owen Cooper of Adolescence fame and as an adult by Elordi) — is rescued from the streets and brought to the Earnshaw estate by the gruff patriarch (Martin Clunes). There, he forms an unbreakable, obsessive bond with the free-spirited Catherine (young Charlotte Mellington, adult Robbie), the daughter of the house. Their childhood idyll, marked by romps across the misty moors and whispered secrets in haylofts, gives way to adult turmoil as class divides and social pressures intrude.
Catherine is torn between her annihilating attachment to Heathcliff and the social security offered by Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), the cultivated neighbour from Thrushcross Grange. She marries Edgar, choosing status and stability over the elemental bond that defines her, and Heathcliff disappears, only to return later transformed — financially secure, socially polished, and carrying the cold patience of someone who has learned how power works.
The story retains Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) as a central presence, but Fennell pares down the novel’s famously layered narrative structure. Rather than preserving Emily Brontë’s intricate frame of nested, unreliable narrators, the film streamlines the generational subplot and reshapes Nelly into a more active, morally ambiguous force. The result is a stylised reframing that foregrounds desire, class anxiety and emotional cruelty over the book’s cyclical design.
Fennell chooses to focus on the erotic undercurrents and psychological torment. This results in a taut runtime that not only feels propulsive but also avoids the drag of some prior versions. However, if you have read the novel more than once, you may balk and bristle at the liberties taken: characters having been combined, timelines shuffled, and key events reimagined for shock value. Fennell takes a subversive detour, declaring her intent to play by her own rules. All this makes the film less an adaptation and more a fever-dream reinterpretation; do not miss the double quotes in the film’s title. Fennel has said that “Wuthering Heights” is all about what she made of the novel when she read it.
Fennell’s psychedelic lens
Fennell, Oscar-winner for Promising Young Woman’s screenplay, cranks the ‘campery’ to eleven, transforming Brontë’s realism into a fare that will leave you conflicted about whether it’s a psychedelic romp, period drama, music video or erotic thriller. The film’s eroticism turns everyday acts into metaphors for forbidden desire This approach aligns with Fennell’s previous work, in which lust and destruction are inseparable, as seen in Saltburn’s infamous bathtub scene. Though provocative, it sometimes becomes too indulgent, with scenes feeling more like a “collage of teenage fantasies.”
Her handling of race also seems problematic. In the novel, Heathcliff is described as ‘dark-skinned,’ possibly of Romani or mixed heritage, a detail that inspired previous adaptations like Arnold’s with a Black actor. Casting the pale, Australian Elordi has led to controversy, with critics arguing it whitewashes the character’s outsider status. Fennell addresses this obliquely through dialogue and visual cues, but it feels half-hearted, which makes you wonder about her bizarre approach to the source material’s themes of otherness. Still, her vision is undeniably fresh, making this a “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild” take.
Margot Robbie, at 35, plays Catherine with a fierce, irrepressible romanticism that defies age-gatekeeping backlash. Her Cathy is bratty and broken, with her pride leading to self-destruction. Robbie lends the role a modern edge, channelling the character’s sexuality in steamy scenes that feel authentic rather than exploitative. It’s a far cry from Merle Oberon’s poised elegance in 1939 or Juliette Binoche’s ethereal turn in 1992; Robbie captures Cathy’s internal storm with wide-eyed intensity. Elordi is a revelation as Heathcliff. He has a soft, sleepy-eyed demeanour and he excels at smouldering sensitivity. He is a ‘demon lover,’ possessive and sadistic. The chemistry between him and Robbie is electric, their scenes crackling with unspoken tension that culminates in passionate, R-rated encounters.
Supporting actors shine, too: Hong Chau’s Nelly is a sly manipulator, adding gravitas to the framing device; Shazad Latif’s Edgar is a poignant ‘finest cuckold’ and Alison Oliver’s Isabela steals scenes with unrestrained fervour, matching Fennell’s freakish energy. Young and incredibly talented actors like Cooper bring fresh pathos to the origins of the romance. Visually, “Wuthering Heights” is a visual feast, courtesy of Oscar-winning Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren (Saltburn, Jay Kelly, La La Land), who creates the right texture and light to suit the characters’ internal states, and production designer Suzie Davies (Saltburn, Conclave), who’s behind the ‘beguiling and grotesque’ aesthetic of the film, and its wet and windswept gloom.
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Jacqueline Durran, the two-time Oscar winner behind the costumes for Barbie and Anna Karenina, designs the wardrobe as an ‘imagined version’ of the period rather than a historical reconstruction; you’ll notice a wide range of influences, including Elizabethan, Georgian, and Victorian styles, mixed with 1950s Hollywood melodrama and contemporary high fashion like Vintage Mugler and Alexander McQueen.
The estates — Wuthering Heights as a crumbling, shadowy manor; Thrushcross Grange as an opulent edifice — throw the class divide into sharp relief, with Saltburn-like garishness making Fennell’s eat-the-rich undertones evident. The soundtrack, featuring a companion album by Charli XCX, gives the film contemporary pop energy. “Wuthering Heights” feels like a concentrated extract rather than a full-bodied stew. It’s extravagant, sometimes to a fault, but it’s also undeniably immersive. It looks set to secure its place among the most debated — if not the among the best — interpretations.
