Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights arrives already weighed down by decades of reverence, misreadings and cinematic baggage, yet this loose, provocative retelling still struck me as far more compelling than its detractors allow. It isn’t faithful, nor does it try to be, but its gothic charge, bold choices and emotional clarity make it a far richer experience than the current tide of negativity suggests says Tony Green.
Introduction
It would probably have been easier to write this review quickly, as I just got on and did it, beginning almost as soon as I left the cinema a week ago. Instead, I’ve spent a whole week watching so many reviews by others on YouTube that I’ve lost count, and re-acquainting myself with the complexities of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, though again via YouTube rather than by actually re-reading the book, which would take me a lot longer than seven days.
Consequently, my mind is too stuffed full of Wuthering Heights-related facts and opinions for me to be as brief as I intended, and I’d started to doubt my own judgement.
But, while I agree with many of the criticisms of the film I’ve encountered, I still stick with my first impression response and continue to swim against the tide of negativity, and say that I liked it.
There are certainly a lot less enjoyable ways to spend two-hours-and-sixteen minutes on a wet Sunday afternoon.
Writer/Director Emerald Fennell has said that her interpretation was influenced by how the book made her feel when she first read it as a fourteen-year-old girl. This is an important point to keep in mind. How you view this film will depend largely on your own past experience of the story, and of the cultural space it occupies in literary and cinematic history.
For me, my first exposure to it was through the 1939 Hollywood version starring Larence Olivier and Merle Oberon.
In my memory, I watched it on TV the very first time my parents went out for the evening and left me home alone. That could be a false memory, because I am sometimes an Unreliable Narrator of my own life, but I loved the film whenever I first saw it, and I love it still.
There have been many adaptations of the novel for T.V and cinema, starting with a long-lost 1920 silent version. I must have seen some of them, and dipped into some this week, but none of them have stuck in my memory. The 1939 version will always be my Wuthering Heights, but that is no more faithful to the novel than Fennell’s movie.
I didn’t really become an avid reader until my late teens, so it was likely in the early-mid 1980s that I first read the book. I’ve never found 19th Century English literature to be as compelling as I think I ought, and I doubt I even finished it on that first occasion. But I have since read it from start to finish at least once.
It’s not a novel I can honestly claim to be one of my all-time favourites, one that I finished more with a sense of accomplishment than of enjoyment, but I did at least come to appreciate its complexity and to understand why it is held in such high regard. I’ve enjoyed enhancing that understanding this last week or so.
Almost all attempts at adaptation omit the second half of the novel entirely, the part that deals with the second generation of characters, after the death of Cathy. That was true of ‘my’ 1939 version, and it’s true also of the 2026 version.
This is understandable. You can only do so much in two-hours or so. But it too easily reduces the story to one of a ‘doomed’ or ‘tragic’ love affair.
Certainly, those elements are there in the source material, but there is so much more besides: It’s a dark gothic horror story, a story of revenge, of forgiveness/lack of forgiveness, of obsession and co-dependency, of abuse and cycles of abuse repeating themselves, and of how individuals might break free of these generational cycles.
To this we must add reflections on the restrictions of late 18th/early 19th century society, particularly for women, and attitudes as regards to the ‘otherness’, of the outsider, be it by virtue of class, race or religious unorthodoxy. Then we have near-incest, given that Heathcliff and Cathy are raised almost as brother and sister (or actual incest. Some critics argue that Heathcliff is Mr Earnshaw’s bastard son. But even leaving that aside, nearly everybody in the book ends up marrying their cousin), and the stark contrast between nature in the raw, and the genteel, mannered ‘civilisation’ of the landed class.
By ignoring volume two (the book was originally published as two volumes) you also ignore what a vindictive, vengeful bastard Heathcliff becomes after the death of Cathy. Sanitising the character by reducing him to a dashing romantic ‘bad boy’ is a predictable route for Hollywood to take. And Emerald Fennell is as guilty of this as everybody else.
I knew nothing of her work before this film, other than that she used to be an actor in Call The Midwife, so I went in with no prior expectations as to what it might be like
But I’ve since learned that she has a certain style that people tend to love or hate. For critics who have seen her previous work to attack this film for being so far from a faithful retelling of Brontë’s story, seems to me to be little more than the result of deliberate and pointless ‘hate-watching’.
Admittedly, whoever made the decision to tag the movie’s trailers under the heading ‘The Greatest Love Story Ever Told’ and to release it on Valentine’s Day did it no favours, because it’s very far from True Romance. But nor is it mere ‘fan-fiction’ or a film that is unrecognisable as Wuthering Heights, as some have claimed.
All that matters, really, is whether or not the film is an enjoyable experience in its own right, and for me it was, as I suspect it shall be for the majority of its audience.
It will also lead to many of its viewers picking up a copy of the novel for the first time. That has to be a positive, even if, like me that very first time, they give up halfway through.
Negatives
The absence of part two of the story was to be expected, but there were some strange decisions made as regards omitting certain important characters or compositing different characters into one.
The most glaring example is the decision to amalgamate Mr Earnshaw with his son Hindley. By eliminating Hindley and transferring his collection of appalling traits, which include drinking[GC1] and gambling away the family’s fortune, and abuse towards both family and servants, especially Heathcliff, there’s no clear reason for the originally kind-hearted head of the Earnshaw clan to rescue the poor foundling from the backstreets of Liverpool in the first place.
I also found Fennell’s decision to have Catherine name the boy ‘Heathcliff’ after a mythical brother who died in infancy, rather odd. Even the early 19th Century the English poor had names, and surely, as the relationship between the two of them developed in intensity, the wild and wayward male centre of the story would have thrown this back at the subject of his obsessive love at some point, ‘I’m not Heathcliff, I’m Patrick!’ or whatever.
I’ll get to the actual performances of the actors in the next section, because they are all good to great.
But there are things to be said about the casting.
Much criticism has concentrated on the ‘whitewashing’ of Heathcliff. I don’t think that DEI types can complain too much, given that we have ‘people of colour’ in two other important roles.
However, I do think they have a point when it comes to Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi. Fennell had cast Elordi in her 2023 film Saltburn, which I haven’t seen, and decided then that she’d found her Heathcliff, because he resembled the way the character had been depicted on the edition of the novel she’d first read as a teenager.
The race of the character is never made explicit in the novel (Irish tinker or Romani are generally seen as most likely), but his ‘dark skinned’ complexion and exotic appearance are, along with his class origins, an essential part of his status as an outsider and of his attraction to women.
Elordi has some Spanish ancestry, and is certainly darker than Margot Robbie, his Catherine, and so he might just have got away with it, had it not been for the casting of a Thai-American Nelly (Hong Chou) and a Pakistani-British Linton, (Shazad Latif).
I suspect Fennell thought this would undermine criticism of her going for a white Heathcliff, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.
Race isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing either, and this is the reason that ‘colour blind casting’ rarely works. After all, this is a world, a remote English Yorkshire village in the first decades of the nineteenth century, where class distinctions exist even within the very wealthy, based on the difference between wealth that is ‘new’ or acquired, and that which is ‘old’ and inherited, between the rising capitalist class and the feudal landed gentry, as a Marxist analysis would have it. Linton alludes to this distinction when speaking of Catherine as a potential wife. And yet we are expected to believe that the Earnshaw’s fail to notice that Linton is literally a non-white colonial?
This, to me was a bigger problem than the casting of a white Heathcliff, because if the world in which the character has found himself is multi-cultural, then his ‘otherness’ is undermined to the detriment of the story.
The overall look of the film has been criticised as being inauthentic, especially when it comes to costumes and set. Maybe it is overly designed, and almost surrealistic in places, but that was clearly through valid artistic decision-making. Like most everything else about the movie, people will either love or hate the visual style. I liked it.
Though the movie, in my opinion, just about retained the gothic essence of the book, and much of its poetic language (maybe not authentic period Yorkshire dialect, but how many would really want that?). But I did think the almost complete absence of the supernatural element, of Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff (though his expressed wish for this is retained) was a mistake). It didn’t need to be exactly like the book, nor to end with a ghostly Cathy and Heathcliff walking hand in hand on the moors as in the 1939 movie, but the movie would have benefited from something of this, and would been in keeping with Fennell’s style.
Lastly, in this section, I’ll touch briefly on the sex question.
In the book, as you’d expect from a novel written by a young woman in the early 1840s, the consummation of Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is barely even hinted at. We assume, probably rightly, that they were lovers, and we must expect ((and many would demand) physical evidence for this consummation in a modern adaptation.
In reality, there’s much less sex in the movie than most assume, and as was suggested by the trailers. There is no nudity, and what we do see, with one, possibly two exceptions, is relatively tastefully done.
The montage which provides our confirmation that Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship was one that was as intense physically as in every other sense, went on a bit too long, and there were a few ‘symbolic’ shots that were too on the nose, with the result that they were more humorous than suggestive.
But I’m guessing that these humorous elements were also there through conscious artistic choice.
I did find the film to be very moving in parts, but not titillating. Whether you see that as a positive or a negative depends on your motivation for going to see it. In reality, if you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve already seen most of the spicy bits.
Positives
Despite my earlier criticisms of some of the casting decisions, I can hardly fault the performances of any members of the small ensemble cast.
Owen Cooper, best known for his role in Netflix’s major TV hit Adolescence, in what had been his first screen role, made an excellent Young Heathcliff, as did Charlotte Mellington as the younger Cathy. During their relatively brief period on screen together, I felt they did a superb job of capturing young friends at play, but with a strong suggestion that their relationship was destined to become rather less innocent as they grew older.
Elordi just about managed to capture the brooding, charismatic, vengeful nature of the older Heathcliff, and Robbie made for a very beautiful and sexy Cathy, even if the actress is about a decade older than she ought to be for the role. The chemistry between the two was enough to make me quickly forget the incongruent age difference between them.
Though I didn’t care for the decision to combine the character of Earnshaw with his son, Martin Clunes gave a great, almost show-stealing performance in the role. I only really know Clunes from the old British Sitcom sitcom Men Behaving Badly. But at some point, he became a fine old English character actor without me noticing. Earnshaw, in this version, is pretty horrible from the beginning, but the way Clunes added layers of self-pity as he aged and his drinking, gambling and physical health worsened was very well done by Clunes, with help from a make-up department that deserves plaudits for the whole movie.
I have strong reservations about how Fennel chose to write the character of Isobella, though Alison Oliver did a great job with the material she was given. Her story arc is one of transformation from a naïve, frustrated teenage girl with nothing to occupy her but various girly hobbies, and living vicariously through the drama of Cathy’s life, to Heathcliff’s willingly abused sex slave.
Isobella is an entirely believable, if creepy character, given the otherwise unrelenting tedium that would likely have been her lot.
However, the portrayal of the Heathcliff – Isobela relationship as Sado-Masochistic did leave me feeling uncomfortable at times. True, nothing happens that Isobella doesn’t consent to. But there are times when ‘consent’ arises more from a form of mental illness than willing choice or sexual taste, and I do think that Fennell went a bit too far in this direction. It was a decision that also, to a large extent, let the abuser, Heathcliff, off the hook.
I didn’t at all buy the ‘in-universe’ explanation as to why we had a non-white Nelly (and why explain this at all if you don’t also ‘explain’ a non-white Linton?). But Hong Chou gave a great performance in the role.
Nelly is an important figure in the plot and format of Wuthering Heights.
In the novel she is the main narrator of the story, and there has been much debate amongst literary critics as to whether she is an ‘unreliable’ or at least a biased narrator keen to aggrandise her own role in events, and to make herself seem better and everybody else much worse than they really were.
Fennell chose to dispose of the narration element entirely. This was the right decision, and I thought the manner in which she, as the writer, and Chou as the actor, were still able to retain the importance and ambiguous nature of the character in the story was one of the movie’s strongest points.
As I’ve said, I loved the semi-surreal beauty of this film, and unlike the beloved 1939 version, which was filmed in California, this one really was set in rural Yorkshire, a Yorkshire that has never looked more beautiful. Some of the cinematography here was stunning.
The film sounded great, too. The score by Anthony Willis was excellent, and there are also very interesting original songs written and performed by Charli XCX. The Soundtrack album is well worth a listen in its own right.
Conclusion
I’d like to see this film again before making a definitive judgement. As I said at the beginning of this article, I enjoyed it as a cinematic experience. But I also agree with a lot of the criticisms. It’s far from flawless, and it certainly isn’t a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel.
But I don’t think a truly faithful adaptation is really possible. The 1939 movie isn’t faithful either, but it’s still a great film, and I disagree with those who say that Fennell’s version is so distinct from the novel that she should have given the characters different names and called it something else. To me, this was still recognisably Wuthering Heights, or at least “Wuthering Heights”. Those inverted commas are in the title for a reason.
Fennell clearly approached her source material with a particular artistic vision, and contrary to the majority critical view, I believe she has produced a loose but entirely valid, bold, imaginative and engaging interpretation.
It seems to be doing well at the box office, and I suspect it will prove much more popular with the public than the critics. Its reputation may well even improve with time.
Or maybe it really is as bad as everybody else seems to think.
“Wuthering Heights” is in cinemas now, and is best seen on a big screen, though I’ll definitely be revisiting it when it becomes available to stream.
Reviewed by Anthony C Green
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