“Wuthering Heights” (2026) Review

This review is going to be a hard one, because I love Emily Brontë’s novel—but I also don’t think filmic adaptations can or should show complete reverence to their source material. Something will always be lost in translation; but what seems to have been lost here is the very spirit of Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece. Emerald Fennell keeps the same story beats (poor boy, rich girl, doomed love affair), but butchers the original story, haphazardly shoving its disparate bits together until she manages to cobble a story that feels like the million romance films you’ve seen before, and that’s a serious problem with a book like Wuthering Heights because this story is not a romance. It’s genre is closer to horror, one where obsession, racism, classism, abuse, and manipulation take centerstage; and by hiding so much of that social commentary, especially in a time when it’s sorely needed, Fennell is ultimately supporting the very system Brontë’s novel defied.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fLCdIYShEQ

            The changes made to the novel are many—characters are deleted, entire personalities and backstories changed, but these are things we’d expect to alter from page to screen. Movies are expensive, and usually made on a tight schedule, so Fennell and co. had less room to play with than Brontë. The main change that needs to be discussed is a pretty significant one: as great of an actor as Jacob Elordi is, he had no business playing Heathcliff. Countless scenes and plot points in the novel depend on Heathcliff’s ‘dark-skin’ for us to understand the wedge between him and Catherine. It’s not just class, but race that separates the two. That’s why, when Heathcliff returns rich after disappearing for many years, he’s still not seen as being worthy of Catherine. Unlike the film, this results in their love never being consummated. This is a key part of the story, revealing the politics at the heart of what the author was trying to explore, yet Elordi’s casting forced the crew to remove it completely. This removal reveals something about the politics of the adaptation.

I want to zoom out a bit and talk about the film’s promotional campaign, because it is quite illuminating. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the film’s poster mirrors that of the racist Gone with the Wind (1939), or that Margot Robbie notoriously wore a necklace that was stolen from India during Britain’s colonial conquest for the press tour. Rather, I believe these incidents, coupled with Elordi’s casting, don’t just show that neither the film nor the filmmaker is interested in interacting with Brontë’s ideas, but that they are working in direct opposition to the author’s concerns, hollowing out those ideas and, similar to Leatherface, wearing the skin to mutate a radical story into little more than a period romantic tragedy. Heathcliff’s domestic abuse is turned into a bizarre kink-play, and the entire second half of the book that concerns reckoning with legacies of violence is completely omitted. This disregard is even noticeable in the set design, like the garish and anachronistic mantel of the Linton household.

We see both Elordi and Robbie trying their best to hide these enormous flaws behind raw commitment, but they don’t have enough chemistry to pull it off. Elordi in particular seems to have completely missed the mark on Heathcliff, doing his best to come off as the mysterious-but-handsome stranger and in the process totally excluding the toxic and abusive aspects that make the character so complex. The same goes with the music: Charlie XCX was an inspired choice for the score, and I think including her music could have placed the past in conversation with the present similar to Jay-Z’s work on The Great Gatsby (2013). But this exciting possibility is ruined by the film as a whole lacking the infrastructure to support that kind of metacommentary.

Really, this adaptation is indicative of a larger aesthetic crisis Western culture currently faces: the myth of apolitical art. Just yesterday, the Berlinale jury and several attending filmmakers embarrassed themselves when asked about Palestine, saying politics isn’t in their wheelhouse despite having just claimed that films are political. Art is an expression of cultural values, of someone’s worldview and the context that shaped that worldview, which is to say: politics. Emily Brontë knew this. She was a woman writing a book with a male penname to get published, she was critiquing colonialism and gender roles, as well as how those institutions impact us on an interpersonal level. By vacuuming out all of this inarguably political content, Fennell is actually supporting the status quo because, to paraphrase Wem Wenders—who, ironically, is part of the aforementioned Berlinale jury—all art is political, especially art that purports to be apolitical. When we fail to challenge larger systems, we endorse the systems already in place. I can’t imagine Brontë would appreciate her work being used to carry water for a system that perpetuates genocide, covers up a child sex trafficking ring and commits imperialism in Latin America. “Wuthering Heights” is in theaters today, and I wish I could tell you to go watch it, but your time is probably better spent elsewhere.