“Wuthering Heights”

The Gloss on the Graveyard

Emerald Fennell has never been a director interested in subtlety; she deals in the cinema of the sledgehammer. From the candy-colored vengeance of *Promising Young Woman* to the baroque excess of *Saltburn*, her work operates as a series of aesthetic provocations, designed less to be watched than to be dissected on social media feeds. With her 2026 adaptation of *Wuthering Heights*, Fennell attempts to drag Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece into the neon-lit abattoir of modern pop culture. The result is a film that is undeniably striking, aggressively stylish, and fundamentally hollow—a Gothic mood board that mistakes toxicity for depth and fetishism for passion.



Fennell’s visual language here is best described as "Hyper-Gothic." Gone are the drab, mud-caked reality of Andrea Arnold’s 2011 interpretation or the classicism of Wyler’s 1939 version. In their place, Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren construct a Yorkshire that feels like a fever dream viewed through a cracked luxury mirror. The interiors of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are suffocatingly opulent—silver walls, flesh-toned corridors, and lighting that oscillates between bruised purples and arterial reds. While visually arresting, this "gaudy splendour" ultimately works against the narrative. Brontë’s characters were forged by the indifferent brutality of nature; Fennell’s characters seem trapped in a high-budget music video. The wind doesn't howl so much as it is sound-mixed to punctuate the needle drops, creating an artificiality that keeps the audience at a safe, voyeuristic distance.



This distance is widened by the casting, which has been the lightning rod for the film’s discourse. The decision to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff—stripping away the character’s racial ambiguity and specific "dark-skinned" otherness described in the text—is a fatal miscalculation. Brontë’s Heathcliff is a victim of systemic dehumanization, which fuels his monstrous revenge. Elordi’s Heathcliff is simply a brooding bad boy, a towering figure of sullen lust whose rage feels performative rather than existential. Beside him, Margot Robbie’s Catherine is too poised, too mature, and far too aware of her own image.

Fennell has spoken about wanting to capture the "primal, sexual" energy she felt reading the book as a teenager. However, in translating this to the screen, she confuses the metaphysical soul-bonding of the novel ("I *am* Heathcliff") with standard erotic thriller mechanics. The chemistry between Robbie and Elordi is palpable, yes, but it lacks the terrifying, necrophilic obsession that makes the story transcend the romance genre. They look like models fighting in a ruined abbey, beautiful but utterly devoid of the starvation—spiritual and physical—that defines the Earnshaws.



Perhaps the film's most egregious sin is its narrative truncation. By severing the story at Catherine’s death and discarding the second generation, Fennell lobotomizes the novel’s moral thesis. *Wuthering Heights* is not a love story; it is a generational saga about the cyclic nature of abuse and the difficulty of breaking it. Without the second half—without the healing brought by the younger Cathy and Hareton—the film reduces the narrative to a glorification of mutual destruction. We are left with the "sado-masochism" Fennell promised, but without the humanistic context that makes the tragedy bearable.

In the end, this *Wuthering Heights* is a triumph of vibe over substance. It is a film obsessed with the *aesthetics* of suffering but uninterested in the *reality* of it. Emerald Fennell has built a magnificent, velvet-lined coffin, but when you pry open the lid, you find no ghosts, no demons, and certainly no soul—only a mirror reflecting our own obsession with beautiful things falling apart.