Most iconic melodramas are built on yearning — that restless, unrelieved ache at the heart of impossible love.
From Romeo and Juliet to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, generations of readers have fed their romantic appetites on stories of lovers torn apart by class, war, duty, or sheer misunderstanding.
Wuthering Heights stands among the most radical expressions of that tradition. A cornerstone of British literature, it remains the only novel by Emily Brontë, who died at thirty without witnessing its legacy. Upon publication, it scandalised Victorian society with its brutality, its moral defiance, and its refusal to soften or redeem its characters.
Raised at Wuthering Heights — a remote estate somewhere in windswept Yorkshire — the landowner’s daughter Catherine and the orphan of unknown origin (online debates still rage over his ethnic background), Heathcliff, are both wild and cruel creatures: codependent, vicious, destroying each other and everyone around them.
Both are products of their upbringing — shaped by abuse, hatred, and class inequality. They are two halves of the same whole.
The story has endured numerous adaptations, most recently Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version. So a new adaptation was only a matter of time. Fifteen years later, unfortunately for fans of the novel, Emerald Fennell got her hands on it.
I.
The Director
Fennell is a controversial filmmaker. Her previous works, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, took over both Pinterest boards and minds of polarised critics and audiences alike.
The general consensus: Fennell’s aestheticism and intriguing ideas cannot conceal weak screenwriting (she prefers to write her own scripts) and the absence of any coherent message for the audience.
Worse still, as a representative of Britain’s mystical upper class elite, Fennell sometimes sends ambiguous signals that reveal a limited perspective on social structures.
In Saltburn, for instance, the villain turns out to be a calculating middle-class failure who deceives naïve English aristocrats and destroys their way of life — a concept that, in modern Britain torn apart by class inequality, feels snobbish and nearly unforgivable.
Given both the source material and her reputation, Fennell faced a difficult task: to prove she could understand the dynamics and motivations of these characters, deconstruct a complex text, and translate it into cinematic language.
Unfortunately, we cannot say that she succeeded.
II.
The TikTok Tragedy
The new Wuthering Heights shares with the book not more than its title, character names, and bits and pieces of the plot.
It is a completely different beast, resembling rather a teenage fan fiction, the movie is stripped of the emotional complexity that defined the original source. Reduced to “she loved him, he loved her,” story on the screen frames the two protagonists as pure victims of circumstance, while everyone else becomes an enemy of their happiness.
Not only is half the plot cut, but one of the key characters — Catherine’s brother Hindley, whose cruelty shaped Heathcliff’s fate — is entirely removed. Instead of a layered narrative, we get a baby food of a story, chewed and spoon-fed for the least attentive viewer.
The motivations of the remaining characters are flat and banal. We never learn what drives Nelly, Catherine’s companion, who serves multiple generations of the Earnshaw and then Linton family and makes pivotal decisions throughout the story. The director offers no alternative perspectives that might challenge the moral standing of the main characters.
Despite its two-hour runtime, the film feels empty — padded with filler scenes of costume changes that resemble music videos. Instead of organic exposition, characters simply explain to themselves (and to us) what is happening, what they plan to do, and why they feel the way they do.
III. Mrs. Robbie(nson) Attacks
Who would have thought Margot Robbie could induce a secondhand embarrassment?
A complete miscast for the archetype of a Victorian Gothic seventeen-year-old heroine, Robbie delivers a caricatured performance that hovers between parody and bad taste. Her Cathy is a Victorian Barbie doll with veneers — pouting, grimacing, and changing accents every other scene.
Wuthering Heights may be decaying, but her highlights remain freshly done. Ah, the miracles of the 1800s hair masters.
Even more impossible to ignore is the double-age gap between the actress and the heroine. The spoiled cruelty and primitive impulsiveness that can be attributed to youth in the book becomes, on screen, the portrait of an unpleasantly childish adult woman who never learned to hold her tongue.
Recasting the female lead could solve 1/3 of the movie issues alone.
IV. Fifty Shades of the Moor
Marketing promoted the film as an erotically charged story that would make audiences’ “knees shake.” We were prepared for the nastiest smuttiest novel adaptation and received a very tame love story. A 90 years old nun has fantasies wilder than this movie’s screenplay.
In fact, it’s one of the most tedious films in recent memory when it comes to matters of sex. It tries to be sexual, it just can’t be sexy however it tries to bring a shock value.
No matter how hard the actors try, that inexplicable on-screen chemistry never materialises. Instead of tension, we get heavy breathing and mechanical bodily choreography that evokes nothing but a yawn. No amount of wall-licking, and even a decently shot stable scene, can save it.
This corpse has gone cold.
Conclusion
I could write much more about what happens here, but honestly, Fennell’s new film doesn’t deserve it. The only thing saving it from being an outright trash is its stunning cinematography. The lighting, color grading, and camerawork are the only elements that make Wuthering Heights resemble cinema rather than an episode of a romance TikTok series.
This “Heights” is beautiful but astonishingly stupid. Obsessed with sex but utterly unsexy. It retells the novel yet completely misses every single character.
In the final scene, a piercing violin plays. I understand that Emerald Fennell desperately wants us to sob. Yet I cannot squeeze out a single tear.
I am tired, and I want to go home.
Perhaps this was an April Fool’s joke. Perhaps we are all dead and this is Heathcliff’s horse dreaming. Perhaps a worthy adaptation of this cult classic still awaits us.
Until then, we will always have Atonement with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
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