2026’s “Wuthering Heights” opens with a body dangling in the town square. In pre-Victorian England, hanging day is the only time high-society dares to mingle with the lower-class. Crowds cheer for death in the streets below. The nameless face swinging from the rope becomes a spectacle.
Sensationalized depravity is director Emerald Fennell’s calling card. Of Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023) fame, the English auteur’s filmography bears highly stylized and provocative aesthetics with exploration of the psychosexual defining her stories. Unsurprisingly, Fennell’s reimagination—produced by starring actress Margot Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment—of English writer Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, tries to get freaky.
Truthfully, the film adaptation trades Brontë’s focus on cyclical trauma, class rage, and racial otherness for romanticized melodrama. Fennell misguidedly transforms the relationship between low-class, adopted protagonist Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and his wealthy caretaker’s daughter—Catherine Earnshaw—into a passionate, forbidden-love story as amorous as it is ruinous.
Where Brontë tells ghost stories of systemic evils that haunt windy Yorkshire moors, Fennell is only palatably honest in her recount. Bestial violence is sealed behind closed doors. Catherine, married at 18, is cast to look older. Meanwhile, the impermissible relationship between the protagonists is rewritten as an illicit, darkly sexual affair instead of one so restrained they never even kiss. However, the subverted nature of their relationship isn’t my concern with this film. Truthfully, taboo concepts which represent the varied human experience—including sexual liberation—are vulnerable to erasure with censorship on the rise. Fennell’s work resists this by glorifying the sensual, and that’s commendable. Whatever, Jacob Elordi, stick those fingers in your mouth for the good of the people.
But there’s terrible irony in a movie celebrating the repressed yet blushing at the naked truth of what Brontë actually wrote. Instead of a violently angry epic, characters and arcs are flattened—soothed. The devastating vulnerability in being nothing at all is traded for sensationalized intimacy. Most notably, the choice to cast a white actor for Heathcliff—a colored man—forgets the thematic thread of racial otherness entirely and strips nuance from a story already starving for it.
Deciding what of the source material is cut or highlighted to fit into the modern zeitgeist is a struggle all book-to-movie adaptations face. Unfortunately—while visually gorgeous—“Wuthering Heights” (2026) tonally misses the mark. A desire to be more than a pulpy fanfiction of Brontë’s novel guiltily pulses beneath skin. It attempts to provoke without daring to push boundaries. It’s a “reimagining” that only ponders: What if Catherine and Heathcliff touched each other? What if Heathcliff was really just misunderstood and yearning and also a freak? Nobody even try to sell me the yearner-Heathcliff agenda. Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave.