Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights … 179 years later
Responses to director Emerald Fennell’s 2026 movie ‘Wuthering Heights’ (adapted from Emily Brönte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights) have been wildly divergent.
‘The movie is soaked in a yearning that females of all persuasions will recognise. Here’s to our inner, liquid howl of want … This is my first five-star review … Nikki Gemmel The Australian newspaper.
‘Extravagantly superficial’ Justin Chang in The New Yorker
‘A deranged, half-assed bodice-ripper that entirely misses the point’ Review LitHub.
‘It trades Gothic for vaudeville.’ Review The Conversation.
One winter during high school, I read Wuthering Heights in front of an open fire or late at night by torchlight under my snug quilt. I particularly enjoyed it when the wind howled, the rain was relentless and the thunder fearsome. Freakish weather evoked Emily Brönte’s windswept, Yorkshire wild moors emphasising the drama of her wild Gothic tale.
Readers please note: Spoiler alerts coming up – not optimal if you haven’t seen the movie!
I really wanted to like/love director Emerald Fennell’s 2026 movie Wuthering Heights – but I just couldn’t. As we left the cinema, I decided a brain clean was needed so I could forget a couple of dodgy gratuitous scenes that had nothing to do with the narrative. In short, my disappointment was not just because the original novel’s storyline had been significantly altered. After all, there’s been over twenty film/television adaptations of Emily Brönte’s novel. Some worked and some of those I’ve seen simply didn’t.
Emerald Fennell was the director of the 2023 Amazon Prime movie Saltburn. The 2001 pop song Murder on the Dancefloor featured in the closing scene. It was paired with the twitching naked buttocks of actor Barry Keoghan and subsequently his muscular arse has been duly appraised, analysed and much appreciated by a legion of Satlburn fans. There was also the issue of semen infused bathwater being drunk by Keoghan – which lent itself to hysteria and parody in equal measure.
Under Fennell’s direction no excess was deemed too much in the Wuthering Heights movie and there were scenes – such as the cruel opening scene of a hanging man ejaculating as he helplessly swung on the gallows – which I felt was gratuitous. His death was being watched by voyeuristic spectators of all ages, including grinning kids. The grim opening didn’t serve the story and may well have been an attempt to shock.
Some of Emily Brönte’s main characters were dumped or changed drastically by the scriptwriters. Frankly, I couldn’t see the point in Brönte’s kindly, genteel Mr Earnshaw morphing into a vindictive, snaky alcoholic. Especially given he’d been generous enough to rescue the young Heathcliff – starving and homeless on the streets of Liverpool – and then house and raise him as a servant on the Yorkshire moors.
Actor Margaret Robbie at 35 years plays the adult Cathy, while Jacob Elordi at 28 is Heathcliff. The childhoods of Cathy and Heathcliff were consigned to accomplished child actors. But most of the movie dwells on imagined events after Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights after a long absence. He’s now rich, confidently sexy and dead set on revenge.
Most of the film concentrates on Cathy and Heathcliff not as adolescents but as adults aged about thirty. In doing so the intensity of their love obsession diminishes. Cathy dies in childbirth as a rather cynical mature aged woman instead of being a vulnerable young woman.
The movie soundtrack is a contemporary concept album released by Charli XCX on the same day as the film. Despite the movie being saturated in Gothic blood-red tones, the cinematography of the film is exquisitely striking and lush. In Cathy’s ghastly death scene in her boudoir, her congealed black blood floods both the bed and floor. It bought to mind an uncontrollable oil slick.
I missed Emily Brönte’s death scene when Cathy tore into a pillow – with her bare teeth – and feverishly scattered the white feathers. Capricious and operatic to the end, Cathy’s passion for Heathcliff is chillingly real. The scene where Heathcliff, stricken with grief, bloodies his head on a tree trunk and howls like a wounded animal is terrifying. Later, he visits the churchyard and pries Cathy’s coffin open to gaze upon her face. Furiously he replaces Edgar Linten’s blonde hair – secreted in a silver locket – with his own dark lock.
Despite rave movie reviews about the gripping lust factor generated by the two stars, I didn’t think there was much credibility or sexual tension between Catherine/Margaret Robbie and Heathcliff/Jacob Elordi . Detachment followed by angry outbursts and rough sex scenes kept the emotional temperature somewhat tepid. Frequently Elordi looked either bored or bemused when speaking Heathcliff’s lines.
Props in the movie were overstated from the teetering piles of Mr Earnshaw’s booze bottles to the black leeches slithering up the walls in Cathy’s death scene. Her boudoir had padded walls featuring flesh-toned latex and fabric decorated with veins and freckles copied from Margot Robbie’s own skin. In retrospect it’s probably pointless to ask – why?
Getting back to Emily Brönte’s book Wuthering Heights. Why has it been adapted so many times across nearly two centuries?
Brönte’s novel was published in London in 1847 under the pen name, Ellis Bell. Brönte died a year later. It wasn’t unusual for female authors to use a male alias especially when tackling topics such as child labour practices, racism, male controlled power and physical abuse.
Although the novel now seems rather tame, at the time Brönte’s themes were judged as dark, Gothic and transgressive. Despite Gothic fiction being wildly fashionable, many critics declared themselves shocked and appalled. Namely because Emily Brönte’s/Ellis Bell’s position on morality was not in accord with the accepted social norms of the times. It broke the rules.
Hypocrisy was rampant given Queen Victoria’s England was a place where corruption, cruelty, exploitation and violence thrived. Pornography was extremely popular in the Victorian era, helped along by phony public morality, puritanical social norms, and repressive legislation.
The Victorian upper classes were not as upstanding as they desperately wanted to appear. Syphilis was rampant and incurable and there was a highly visible sex trade especially in London and Liverpool.
In conclusion, it’s significant Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights has never been out of print in 179 years. And even in our Trumpian world of distraction and contagious cynicism it continues to resonate.
photo: from ‘Wuthering Heights’ 2026 movie – adapted from Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights novel, published in 1847.