“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” – Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights.

Emerald Fennel prefaced her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel by claiming that such a dense, difficult book cannot possibly be adapted, and so her film is merely a version she remembered reading but was not actually real. From the first casting announcements to the tensely-anticipated release date, “Wuthering Heights” (2026) was both criticized and clamoured for. It seemed no one truly knew what to do about this lurid film.

With the flurry of fanaticism surrounding this movie, “Wuthering Heights” delivered what Fennell promised: an intensely romanticized, glamorized and sanitized version of the gothic story, distilled down to the peaks and valleys that would be imprinted on the mind of someone who had read the book many, many years prior.

The costumes. The sets. The accompanying Charli xcx album. The A-lister lead actors. All of it urges the viewer to believe this film is a sort of fantasy world built from the bare bones of Brontë’s novel, an intentionally incorrect retelling fully embodying the glaring inaccuracies. But that delivery, if it was, in fact, attempted, falls flat. 

At its core, both the film and book center around the tumultuous relationship of Cathering Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a boy taken in by her family when they are children. Up until Catherine’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, dies, the film portrays all of the core elements of the novel with enough of a believable and entertaining spin that anyone who has read the book but enjoys a gripping romance story could be bewitched. Catherine and Heathcliff seem bound together, not just by their circumstances or temperaments, but by their mutual, hidden affections and a sensual tension that cannot ever break. They barb each other with their wits, they match each other’s tumultuous emotions, they know each other from the depths of their souls. Where the film diverts from the source material can be forgiven because their characters and their love is represented well enough to overshadow it. 

All of that crashes down once they enter into their affair. Caught in a storm in the same place they once were stuck as children, Heathcliff admonishes Catherine for abandoning him to marry Edgar and for declaring a union with himself would degrade her. Catherine explains he only heard part of what she said, and discovers that her companion, Nelly, purposefully pushed her to snub Heathcliff while he was listening. She proclaims her love for him, they kiss, and after her father’s funeral, they begin meeting in secret.

From there, the story devolves into something that hardly resembles the novel. Sure, the main plot points are still present, like before, but they are so warped and ungrounded that it is hard to see where it fits into Brontë’s work at all. 

Heathcliff marries Isabella, Catherine’s sister-in-law, to torture Catherine when she ends their affair after he offered to kill Edgar Linton, her husband, should she ask him to. He and Isabella enter what can only be described as an imitation of a BDSM relationship conjured from the mind of someone who vaguely heard of Fifty Shades of Grey one time. Catherine, who has been pregnant since before Heathcliff returned, falls into such intense despair at his marriage that she nearly ruins her own marriage before losing her baby and dying of sepsis due to Nelly’s purposeful disbelief of her suffering. 

Having learned of her suffering, Heathcliff races to Catherine but arrives after her death; he cradles her corpse and begs her to not leave him, to haunt him, to stay with him. Moving from his despair, the film ends with a montage of Heathcliff and Catherine as kids, the last time they could truly belong to one another. A dramatic, sentimental ending for a dramatic, sensual movie.

Catherine’s death is only half of the novel’s story. Brontë writes about the second generation of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, chronicling their tragically entwined lives. But, alas, this movie could only be two hours and 15 minutes long. Sigh.

Fennell’s interpretation of the Victorian novel does have some merit. The set design was breathtakingly moody. The lush colors and decadent rooms and whimsical gardens of the Grange are pitted against the protruding pillars of rock, gritty lodgings and despairing disrepair of the Heights, creating a stark contrast. Each atmospheric choice immersed the viewer into the mood of the respective manors and set the stage for an ill-fated love story. The Heights look like the dark, damp and impenetrable fortress of despair that the novel depicts; the Grange looks like the enticing, lively and respectable home it is described as on the pages.

The costumes and hairstyles were also alluring. Though not historically accurate in the slightest, they were a delight to look at and a strong characterization tool. Catherine frequently wears red garments reflective of her fiery temperament and enduring passion, and foreboding her bloody death. Isabella contrasts Catherine, wearing light pastel colors and frothy fabrics, cementing the reality that Heathcliff could never want her for anything other than to punish Catherine; she is a pale, fragile tool in his all-consuming love and rage for Catherine. 

Hanging over all other alterations and creative liberties to the original work is the casting. Scholars largely agree that Heathcliff is written as a person of color, most likely of Romani descent, and thus the way he is treated in the novel is framed from a place of both classism and racism. Jacob Elordi, a white Australian actor, was cast in the role, eliminating all themes surrounding race and power and removing a vital part of the original story. Other than Heathcliff, the casting for Nelly and Edgar placed a Thai-American actress and a British-Pakistani actor in the roles, which were twisted to portray the characters as much more vindictive and weak-willed, respectively. As the only actors of color, this distortion of their characters, nearly presenting Nelly and the villain and Edgar as a pushover, is coupled with the erasure of Heathcliff’s ethnicity to once again place white people on a pedestal.

This film wanted to take Brontë’s work and transform it into a bodice-ripping romance for the modern audience. Fennell’s signature squeamish sexual style comes in full force, with a hanging man’s erection, fingers puncturing raw egg yolks and jelling fish, frequent scenes of carnal intimacy (though next-to-no bare skin shown throughout the film), rooms painted like skin complete with veins and many, many fingers in other people’s mouths. 

However, the draw of such steamy romances comes from tension, which was largely squandered in this film. The love interests should be suffering from the unbearable tension between each other but unable to truly act on it; Catherine is married and pregnant, yet they enter a physical affair almost immediately upon being reunited. In the novel, the tragedy of their love stems from their inability to live in it. The film takes this away, and with it goes the depth of emotion Brontë so masterfully crafted.

“Wuthering Heights” had potential. By enmeshing some characters into one, poaching plot points from the unused second half and distilling the characters and story into a digestible, sexy romance, Fennell nearly succeeded in recasting Brontë’s novel into something new and separate, something misremembered and mistold due to a desire for something more. It still presented compelling visuals and an entertaining time at the theater. It merely took a few missteps too many to sell the audience on its worth.