Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights strips away the Gothic and psychological intensity that defines Emily Brontë’s original version.
In reimagining the novel through a lens of heightened stylisation, Fennell shifts emphasis from interior torment and narrative complexity to visual spectacle, privileging aesthetic excess over the emotional power that gives Brontë’s work its enduring force.
Brontë published the novel at just twenty-nine, constructing a newly radical narrative form through layered narration, temporal dislocation, and unreliable perspectives that mirror the story’s thematic instability. Any adaptation must therefore grapple not only with the plot but also with conveying a similar voice, framing, and unsettling ambiguity that animates the text. It is precisely here that Fennell’s film begins to falter.
Positioned as an interpretation rather than a direct adaptation, the film nonetheless reduces much of the novel’s structural daring to surface-level intensity. What emerges feels less like reinvention than simplification. I think it would function far better as a standalone work detached from Brontë’s source material – though perhaps even that is too generous.
From the outset, Fennell foregrounds spectacle through expansive, exaggerated visuals of North Yorkshire. While this attempts to echo Brontë’s harrowingly beautiful descriptions of the moors – where ‘there was no moon, and everything beneath lay in misty darkness’ – the mise-en-scène feels overly artificial, failing to encapsulate her psychologically charged landscapes. Excessive fog and hyper-saturated colour palettes dilute the wildness that defines so much of the novel, aestheticising the natural setting. The moors are consequently flattened into an insincere backdrop rather than becoming, as in the novel, an embodiment of the characters’ turmoil.
The same prioritisation of artifice extends to character. Fennell’s modern costuming and contemporary score, including music by Charli XCX, signal deliberate temporal dislocation. Rather than immersing viewers in Brontë’s nineteenth-century world, the film foregrounds its own constructedness. Margot Robbie’s exaggerated costumes and bright-red sunglasses transform Catherine into an iconographic figure, distancing her from the volatile, self-divided heroine Brontë crafted. When Catherine declares she ‘shall get wild’, the threat lands in the novel as destabilising and foreboding; in the film, however, Brontë’s established intensity is blunted by Fennell’s choice of aesthetic self-consciousness, draining the volatility that defines Catherine’s character.
This carries over into the film’s framing of the central relationship. Promotional claims of “the greatest love story of all time” sit uneasily alongside Brontë’s far darker exploration of obsession and mutual destruction between Catherine and Heathcliff. You might start to wonder whether Fennell read Wuthering Heights at all. The novel’s power lies in its refusal to sentimentalise them; their bond is elemental, but also crucially corrosive. Fennell’s emphasis on erotic spectacle and visual provocation reframes their relationship as heightened romance, denying the brutality that makes the original so unsettling.
At times, it feels as though Fennell made the film solely to generate striking, yet ultimately hollow, images of its aesthetically compelling central couple. Where Brontë constructs meaning through narrative layering and fragmentation, Fennell substitutes visual intensity for psychological intricacy. She would, however, make a formidable music-video director, because these sequences thrive solely on surface and sensation – qualities that fail to sustain a novel built on obsession, cruelty, and moral extremity.
I would have probably enjoyed the film more had Fennell abandoned the novel entirely. Despite its undeniable visual allure, I entered the cinema already preoccupied by stylistic choices and casting debates; the film felt almost doomed before it began.
Jacob Elordi’s controversial casting as Heathcliff was undoubtedly the main topic of discussion before the film’s release, as his enigmatic character creates central tensions in adapting the novel. Brontë repeatedly marks Heathcliff as racially and socially other, at one point speculated to be the child of ‘an Indian queen’. His ambiguous origins intensify his exclusion, fuelling the novel’s explorations into inheritance, belonging, and colonial anxiety. Earlier adaptations, such as Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version, confronted this directly by casting James Howson as the first Black Heathcliff. Fennell, by contrast, largely sidesteps racial ambiguity. In doing so, the adaptation diminishes a crucial dimension of Heathcliff’s outsider status and the structural forces shaping his violence.
These character alterations extend to his behaviour. I initially tried to give Fennell’s decisions the benefit of the doubt, noting that Heathcliff’s cruelty – including his abuse of Isabella and the killing of her dog – risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes if portrayed without nuance. Yet Fennell largely erases such actions to render him more conventionally desirable and sympathetic, consequently leaving unresolved the question of why a non-white actor could not be cast as Heathcliff.
Fennell is under no obligation to produce a faithful adaptation, yet she offers little new critical insight. It feels frustratingly one-dimensional, failing to engage meaningfully with the novel’s concerns of class mobility, generational trauma, and patriarchal constraint. Heathcliff’s rise to wealth remains underdeveloped, displaced by an emphasis on his humiliating, BDSM-tinged relationship with Isabella, played with comic flair by Alison Oliver. While entertaining, moments such as her crawling on all fours undermine a character who, in Brontë’s 1847 text, embodies resilience. Isabella’s escape – culminating in her declaration, ‘I’ll smash it!’, as she casts away her wedding ring – constitutes one of the novel’s most radical assertions of female autonomy within nineteenth-century patriarchy. Comic exaggeration reduces such defiance to spectacle, eliminating the novel’s interrogation of gendered power.
Despite these inconsistencies, the adaptation has reignited interest in the novel, surging book sales and thus prompting a renewed readership. If Fennell’s film achieves anything, I would hope it is in renewed attention to the novel itself. Readers returning to Brontë will encounter a work of far greater moral extremity and narrative daring than its stylised reinterpretation suggests.
Ultimately, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is best approached with caution. However visually striking, the adaptation fails to capture Brontë’s structural and psychological daring. In watching the film, we learn that appearance alone cannot sustain a story of such emotional and thematic depth, and what remains is a version that gestures towards Brontë’s vision without ever fully grasping its power.
