This review contains spoilers.

In 2024, Emerald Fennell announced she was in the process of adapting Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel follows the Earnshaw family, the toxic romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and the revenge plots surrounding the estate of Wuthering Heights. 

Fennell had already demonstrated an eye towards the twisted and the grotesque with thrillers like Saltburn (2023) and Promising Young Woman (2020), aligning perfectly with the gothic elements of Wuthering Heights. So, I had high expectations.

Given that this would be her third film, I hoped that she would improve on the creative and structural faults of her first films: poor dialogue, inconsistent writing, overly long montages of scenes with music, and inaccurate casting choices, to name a few. Indeed, following the casting announcements for Wuthering Heights, I knew I would be disappointed. 

The players

The film only ‘adapts’ the first half of the novel, and many essential characters are also absent. For example, Cathy’s brother Hindley is not a character in this film. Hindley is a perpetrator of abuse in Brontë’s novel, and removing him minimizes the trauma that Cathy and Heathcliff suffer. 

Additionally, the casting for the film’s leads was terrible. Margot Robbie as 15-year-old Cathy was not convincing at all, and watching Robbie, a woman in her thirties, throw teenage-hissy-fits was rather ridiculous to watch.  

The decision to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff is one of disturbing ignorance. Brontë depicts Heathcliff as Romani, subjecting him to racial abuse, which is what forms his angry and vengeful character. Neglecting to explore this facet of the story, to me, fails to tell the actual story itself. 

The design 

The film has also been criticized for its lack of historical accuracy in set design and costuming. However, I did find something compelling about the costumes and set design being ‘wrong.’

Fennell’s twisted, grotesque, and generally out-of-place sets and costumes align with conventions commonly used in the gothic genre. For instance, Cathy’s bedroom is wallpapered to resemble her skin and is meant to mirror what her body is experiencing. 

However, Fennell only utilizes this design twice. Once, during a sex scene with Heathcliff in which he licks the part of the wall that resembles her chest, and again when she dies, and leeches are placed on both Cathy’s skin and the wall. Meanwhile, this motif is abandoned in scenes such as when Cathy is confined in her room during her illness; while Cathy suffers physically from her illness, and mentally from her love for Heathcliff, her room is still pristine. 

This underutilization makes the interesting set choices seem more like a happy accident, rather than a deliberate artistic technique, further testifying to Fennell’s lack of creative direction. 

Cathy’s costumes become more extravagant — and historically inaccurate — when she leaves Wuthering Heights. She wears long skirts with stays and riding boots at the Heights, but once at Thrushcross Grange, she wears what look like Dior ballgowns. Her makeup follows this pattern: a plain face at the Heights, but gems and winged eyeliner at the Grange.  

The music 

Another point of contention for critics has been the film’s music, which features an album by Charli XCX. I’ll confess that I quite liked the music itself, especially “Chains of Love” and “Always Everywhere.” But they do not fit in the movie, and the club beats overtop of Cathy rambling across the heath, or Heathcliff cutting wood, end up feeling like a really long music video.

The only two music choices that really fit were “House” by Charli XCX, featuring John Cale, with its haunting monologue, and the folky ballad “Dark Eyed Sailor” by Olivia Chaney. 

“House,” which played after the first scene, made Wuthering Heights feel abrasive and an oppressive intrusion, foreboding sinister events at the house. “Dark Eyed Sailor” played over a montage of Cathy preparing for her wedding to Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). The melancholy music created a pause in the story, which allowed for some actual emotions to be felt by both characters and viewers. 

The story

My primary annoyance with this film is how it disregards Brontë’s masterfully written characters and warps their disposition for the sake of heightening the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff. 

In the novel, the maid Nelly is the narrator of the story, and while she is unreliable and can be vindictive towards those who have wronged her, she is not a villain. In Fennell’s film, Nelly (Hong Chau) is one of the primary villains who spites Cathy and Heathcliff, thwarts their relationship constantly, and by the end of the movie accepts the blame for Cathy’s death. 

Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) is also a complete reduction of the character in Brontë’s novel. Isabella is meant to be the youthful sister of Edgar, a little naive but strong-willed. In the novel, Heathcliff manipulates her into marrying him and later abuses her. Isabella manages to escape his abuse and flees with their son, Linton Heathcliff. 

Isabella, in this film, is an infantilized, hyper-sexualized young woman, portrayed with violent and perverse tendencies — for example, she has dolls of the inhabitants of her home and mutilates them when they ‘argue.’ Furthermore, she accepts Heathcliff’s abuse under the guise of a submission kink. Considering that the original character is a survivor of domestic abuse, this ‘revisioning’ of her character is particularly offensive. 

I also question Fennell’s decision to portray the film’s only characters of colour, Nelly and Edgar, as villains, while portraying Heathcliff, the novel’s only character of colour, as a white man. In the film, Nelly’s hostility towards Cathy has an undertone of class jealousy: Nelly feels that Cathy is ungrateful and scorns her as selfish and spoiled. Nelly is depicted as the bastard daughter of a lord, and insulting comments on her race make her spiteful towards Cathy. 

Similarly, Edgar is portrayed as having a source of foreign wealth and is depicted as the cuckolded husband who becomes his wife’s captor. In the end, Fennell uses these plot points to paint Nelly and Edgar as tyrants, which is another slap in the face to Brontë’s complex and long-suffering original characters. 

The classism, elitism, and racism experienced by Heathcliff are undercuts to the romantic aspects of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, so Fennell completely removes these key elements, replacing them with sex scene after sex scene. I think lust has a place in Wuthering Heights; Cathy and Heathcliff are both passionate characters who love with every emotion, including hate. But this adaptation was not interested in portraying anything outside of lust for the purpose of shock value, which devalues the story. 

The end? 

Portraying abuse as something sexually gratifying is sinister, and robs characters like Isabella of their strength. Removing Heathcliff’s racialized identity, while also playing into the villainization of people of colour in fiction, is not just lazy, it is a microaggression.  

To summarize Fennell’s film, Cathy is a forever 35-year-old, Heathcliff’s biggest struggle is that he is a poor, conventionally attractive white man, Nelly is a jealous saboteur, Isabella is a hyper-sexualized child, Edgar is an oppressive and loveless husband, and they all pose obstacles to Cathy and Heathcliff’s happiness. 

Dear reader, this is not just a fundamental misreading. No, this is a deliberate bastardization of the story, which, at worst, serves the purpose of being a fantasy for Fennell, or at best, an extremely shallow take on a very complex story.