Wuthering Heights (2026)
Adapting Wuthering Heights is, at this point, something of a cottage industry. We have had brooding Oliviers, rain-soaked moors, and at least one version that felt more like a perfume advertisement than a film. Emerald Fennell’s entry into this crowded field is, to her credit, none of those things. It is something stranger and more interesting than any of them, even if it is not quite as good as it thinks it is.
The story will be familiar to most. Catherine Earnshaw grows up alongside Heathcliff, a foundling brought home to the Yorkshire moors by her father, and the two develop a bond that goes well beyond fond companionship. When Catherine opts for the financial security of Edgar Linton over the altogether less bankable Heathcliff, he vanishes — only to return years later with money, menace, and a very long memory. Fennell focuses on this first arc of the novel, the early passion and its unravelling, leaving aside the darker generational machinery that Brontë deploys in the second half. It is a defensible choice. Whether it is the right one is another matter.
Margot Robbie plays Catherine with a kind of radiant, self-consuming intensity that is genuinely difficult to look away from. The character’s particular genius, in my view, is that she is neither victim nor villain but something more unsettling: a person of enormous feeling and almost no self-knowledge. Robbie gets that. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff is well-cast physically, and in the film’s earlier passages he carries a raw, unguarded quality that suits the role well. As the film progresses, though, the performance retreats into posture. More cheekbone, less interiority. It is not entirely his fault; the script gives him less to work with as things develop.
The production design deserves its own paragraph, possibly its own award. Jacqueline Durran’s costuming is deliberately, gloriously unmoored from any specific historical moment, drawing on silhouettes that feel more mid-twentieth century than nineteenth, and the moors themselves are photographed in colours so saturated they seem to belong to a half-remembered dream rather than any actual county in England. Charli XCX’s original score is the kind of casting decision that reads as a provocation on paper and, somewhat against expectations, works on screen. It gives the film a temporal strangeness that I think is one of its genuine strengths.
Where Wuthering Heights loses me, though, is in its relationship to its own material. Brontë’s novel is not simply a love story with bad weather. It is, among other things, an examination of what dispossession does to a person over time, of how class and belonging shape desire and resentment into something almost indistinguishable from violence. Heathcliff’s obsession is not merely romantic; it is, at its root, the hunger of someone who was never permitted to belong anywhere. Fennell gestures at this. But gesturing is not the same as grappling, and too often the film seems more interested in the aesthetics of longing than its causes.
That said, this is not a film to dismiss. It has ambition, visual intelligence, and two lead performances that, at their best, earn the material. In my opinion, it is the kind of film that rewards a generous viewing and frustrates a rigorous one. Approach it in the right spirit and there is real pleasure here. Approach it expecting the full force of the novel and you may find yourself admiring the frame considerably more than the picture inside it.
Fair, and worth seeing. Probably not worth haunting, though.