It’s "Wuthering Heights" week. That is: the week Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel finally hits screens. If you’ve paid even a sliver of attention to the world of cinema over the past few months, you’ll already know that this is set to be one of 2026’s culture-defining moments.
Why? To start with, it stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the roles of Cathy and Heathcliff, two Hollywood juggernauts taking on literary icons. Then there’s Emerald Fennell, director of Saltburn, whose signature subversive creative vision will bring an entirely new perspective to the gothic love story. And finally, there’s Charli xcx, who’s ditched the club-rat chaos of Brat to record the film’s broody soundtrack. Needless to say, it’s a big deal – whether you’ve read the novel or not.
The film comes out this Friday, 13th February (ominous and romantic!), but it’s already been dividing cinephiles and bookworms fans for months, as we’ve been drip-fed behind-the-scenes snippets that reveal historically inaccurate costumes and surreal approaches to set design. It was clear from the outset that Fennell was never going to be a completely faithful adaptation. Now, we’re finally about to see whether her creative risk-taking pays off.
Fall in love again and again.
What is Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights” about?
Based on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name, Wuthering Heights brings to life literature’s most famous toxic relationship. The stars of the story are Cathy and her foster brother Heathcliff, who are raised together in an abusive household, the titular Wuthering Heights, on the Yorkshire Moors. Over the years, they form a close bond, one that’s only intensified by the forbidden nature of their relationship.
An ethnically ambiguous orphan, Heathcliff is something of a social outcast – not exactly marriage material in the 19th century. Instead, Cathy marries into a neighbouring family, the Lintons, and Heathcliff runs away in despair, returning years later with mysterious riches, ready to enact his revenge. When Cathy’s new husband, Edgar, banishes Heathcliff from their property, she’s so heartbroken she essentially goes on hunger strike, before falling ill while pregnant, dying soon after giving birth. Heathcliff is, naturally, devastated and begs Cathy to visit him from the afterlife until he can join her. Remember Kate Bush’s lyric “Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home, I'm so cold, Let me in-a-your window”? That’s about the subsequent haunting.
Lots more happens in the book between the two neighbouring families, but expect Fennell’s adaptation to zoom in hard on the story’s two famous toxic lovers.
“Wuthering Heights” reviews
With just days to go until Wuthering Heights lands in cinemas, critics’ reviews are pouring in thick and fast. And, well, opinions are divided. Across the board, the film has received five stars (The Telegraph) and one star (The Independent), settling with a 70% score on Rotten Tomatoes, at the time of writing. Some say it’s a modern classic, others believe it’s an abomination. Either way, it’s got people talking.
Let’s start with the positives. Many critics have raved about the film’s distinctive aesthetic, one that merges period drama with bold, contemporary stylistic choices.
“This is Fennell’s aesthetic throughout: loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface,” writes David Sims for The Atlantic. “Wuthering Heights, sprawling and objectively tough to capture faithfully, hinges on the unbalanced, teenage energy of its central relationship – here, expressed through glossy, MTV-esque visuals that the director deploys with aplomb.”
And while a yassified version of Wuthering Heights might not be everyone’s cup of tea, some critics believe that its “smooth-brained” approach is actually its biggest strength. “Wuthering Heights is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date,” says Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “Fennell surveys Brontë’s saga of doomed passion, obsession, and multigenerational resentment and sums it up as the story of two incredibly messy bitches who can’t stay away from one another.” We’re seated.
Meanwhile, Robbie Collin’s five-star review for The Telegraph enthusiastically endorsed Fennell’s striking visual identity. “Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right,” he writes. “Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.”
And as for the cast? Elordi’s performance as Heathcliff is emerging as the standout. “Coming to Heathcliff fresh from another intensely physical role (Frankenstein), the actor’s gravitational pull is immense,” says Beth Webb at Empire. “As Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is, for a moment, dashed to the rocks, the actor skillfully switches between boundless desire, tenderness and something far flintier.”
In her gothic romance era.
It’s fair to say that there are no lukewarm opinions about Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Take Clarisse Loughrey’s one-star review for The Independent, for example: “Our modern literacy crisis has found a new figurehead in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It’s Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic for a culture that’s denigrated literature to the point where it’s no longer intended to expand the mind but to distract it.” Ouch.
Laughrey takes particular issue with how the adaptation smooths over many of the more nuanced themes of race and class that appear in the book. This is most clear in Heathcliff’s casting as a white man, something that’s already sparked feverish debate online. “It's an astonishingly hollow work,” says Loughrey. “Some of this, it can be argued, was already signalled by the film’s casting and the choice to obliterate any mention of race, colonialism, or ostracisation in the telling of pseudo-siblings Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive codependence. Heathcliff, whose ethnically ambiguous appearance is of great concern to every other character in the book, is played by white Australian actor Jacob Elordi.”
What’s more, Loughrey argues that the film’s steamier moments don’t even have the desired effect. “A hanged man with an erection drives a village into a Bacchanalian frenzy. A woman wears a dog collar and barks,” she says. “But these scenes aren’t provocative when they’re so expressly played as a joke, mostly with a fetishistic view of class that categorises poor people as sexual deviants and rich people as clueless prudes.”
Danny Leigh at Financial Times agrees: “Sorry people, but the kink proves mostly straitlaced, the S&M more M&S. The biggest shock the movie really has for us? The chemistry between the stars is damp.” Leigh also wasn’t convinced by Fennell’s contemporary approach to costumes and set design, calling the film an “arthouse Carry On”, before criticising what he sees as attempts to go viral. “You may tire, though, of the movie’s urge to constantly give us new things to gawp at – or perhaps give them to TikTok, which helped make Saltburn a viral hit.”
This sentiment was echoed by Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian, who described the second half of the film as “a 136-minute video for the Charli xcx songs on the soundtrack,” before concluding that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a “quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.”
Over at The New Yorker, film critic Justin Chang was slightly more measured. “These are clever visual conceits, and Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is certainly something to behold,” he writes. “I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.”
Anyone who’s watched Saltburn knows that Fennell’s not afraid to go there. And she certainly didn’t hold back with Wuthering Heights. The film’s opening scene is highlighted in nearly every review, positive and negative. As Beth Webb puts it for Empire, “This is the first time Emerald Fennell is not working with an original story, although a faithful retelling this certainly ain’t – unless there’s an earlier edition of Brontë’s novel which begins with a hanging man’s member ironically springing to life in front of a crowd of feral spectators.”
“In brutal 19th-century Yorkshire, a public execution sees the hanged man make an oddly enthused exit from life. “He’s got a stiffy!” it is pointed out, in case of confusion.” – Danny Leigh, Financial Times.
Alison Willmore (Vulture) also points to a raunchy scene on the Yorkshire Moors “in which a grown Cathy, played by Margot Robbie, is caught masturbating out on the moors by Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who promptly grabs the hand she’s trying to embarrassingly wipe on her skirt, sniffs, and then licks it. Who needs repression when you can have foreplay?” Avoid watching this film with your parents at all costs.
We're feeling horny in our petticoats.
