“Wuthering Heights” Review: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?

The worth and weight of Wuthering Heights as a great novel is in its complexity, its intergenerational tragedy and narrative murkiness among two interlinked families on the Yorkshire Moors. For the 16^th cinematic adaptation, writer/director Emerald Fennell script repeats the cardinal offense that has been enacted against the book time and time again by ignoring basically everything apart from the story of toxic lovers Cathy and Heathcliff. That is, after all, the easy bit, the part that allows filmmakers to ignore the darkest and most challenging aspects of Emily Brontë’s narrative. Plus, it must be said, it cuts the cast in half as there’s none of that messy, borderline incestuous “second generation” stuff with their children.

After cannibalizing much of early 20^th century British literature’s more sordid and saucy volumes for Saltburn, Fennell undertakes her first true adaptation with Wuthering Heights. Sorry, make that “Wuthering Heights,” the stylized quotation marks indicating that she’s not really adapting the book but telling the story it inspired in her head. Her script goes even further in its deletions than most prior adaptations, eradicating the kids and also Cathy’s brother, Hindley. Not only does he die before before the film begins but Fennell renames him Heathcliff, so that young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) can bestow the borrowed name upon the young street urchin (Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) that her drunkard and dissolute father, Mr. Earnshaw (veteran British comedy actor Martin Clunes), brought back from town. Up in the Yorkshire Dales, they grow into lusty adults, played by Margot Robbie (sporting a wobbly and definitely not region-specific accent) and Jacob Elordi (doing markedly better), and under the watchful eye of Cathy’s companion, Nelly (Hong Chau, who doesn’t even try). Somehow in the intervening years, they have all aged unequally, and now comes the messy, violent, and sordid rutting between Cathy and Heathcliff that sees her wrecking her marital vows to her milquetoast and wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif).

Fennell seems determined to cling to her title of Cinema’s Leading Edgelady by just freely rewriting characters to whatever salacious depravity fits her ends. There’s a brief implication that Earnshaw is abusing his daughter, while poor Isabella (Alison Oliver), Cathy’s innocent sister-in-law, gets subverted into a dead-end BDSM subplot. Meanwhile, Cathy and Heathcliff are at it like knives in sex scenes seemingly shot with no-nudity clauses.

Through her half-remembered veil, Fennell hasn’t really adapted Wuthering Heights. Her interpretation of Cathy is as an ambitious daughter of an ailing family, torn between her urges for fortune and her lust for an unsuitable brigand. It’s Gone with the Wind sans the racism, drenched in Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic tendencies.

Her critical mistake is aging up Cathy. Brontë wrote her as a naïve and selfish 17-year-old fool, her sins attributable to her youth: those same actions at the hands of the 35-year-old Robbie are less tragically pathetic, and much more like the solipsistic vindictiveness of Scarlett O’Hara. When Heathcliff rides off into the setting sun, the burning sky may as well be over Atlanta rather than Arkengarthdale.

Saltburn cinematographer Linus Sandgren undoubtedly captures the rugged splendor of the Yorkshire Moors – although, it must be said, that’s not much of a challenge even though he’s constantly fighting with artificial rain and endless smoke machines. Yet the two rival houses of the Earnshaws’ bleak Wuthering Heights and the Lintons’ luxurious Thrushcross Grange are so deliberately artificial and shot in such stark and color-pummeled tones that Fennell seems to be channeling Sleepy Hollow-era Tim Burton in their Gothic ridiculousness.

It’s all undeniably gorgeous, but distractingly so. There are multiple scenes – well, “scenes” seems overly generous – that are little more than excuses for Robbie to wear yet another fancy frock. In an era when scripts are being written for viewers to absorb in between doomscrolling sessions, “Wuthering Heights” is filmed in order to fill endless Vogue photospreads. For all of Elordi’s mutton-chopped brooding and Robbie’s vamping, there’s something shallow and glib about “Wuthering Heights.” Yet again, the psychosexual classic tragedy has been turned into a well-crafted mass-market potboiler.

This article appears in February 13 • 2026.