English director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell brings her visually striking, provocative style to “Wuthering Heights,” a 2026 film adaptation of one of literary history’s most beloved Gothic romances by Emily Brontë.

Starring Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw, with a score by Charli xcx, the film was positioned as a sultry, sex-driven Valentine’s Day weekend box-office hit. 

However, the film has received backlash for its hyper-erotic focus and the casting of Robbie and Elordi. The latter portrays a character canonically described as having dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes, with modern literary critics attributing the character as an early condemnation of the English slave trade. 

Fennell publicly defended her choices at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in Sept. 2025. 

Fennell said her adaptation is akin to her initial interpretation of the book at 14-years-old. She noted Elordi is a vision of the Heathcliff she imagined, sharing that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff in the first book that I read.”

As reviews of the film following its Valentine’s Day opening arrive, the anticipation and debate surrounding its success have finally reached their peak.

With an $80 million budget, this film is undeniably stunning. Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren beautifully captured the moody, expansive moors of Yorkshire Dale National Park in North Yorkshire, England. The set design, costuming, hard-hitting score and breathtaking cinematography are remarkable. 

However, the strikingly blinding visuals can only mask so many adaptive inaccuracies or novelistic details that were simply left out.

While the adaptation thrives visually, it lacks depth. If Fennell aimed to produce a film with the same allure as the fan fiction I read under my bed covers as a 14-year-old, she succeeded. She has created a lustfully charged film that clings desperately to the source material. 

It is my belief that a cornerstone of a successful adaptation is whether it properly translates the tonal depth and central messaging of its literary origins. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” glosses over or outright omits the novel’s central themes in favor of capitalizing on the “primal, sexual” tones Fennell saw in her adolescent interpretation.

Brontë’s story is thematically rooted in class disparity and racial otherness. These elements not only define Heathcliff’s character but also serve as the driving force preventing him and Cathy from being together. By stripping race from the story and attempting to mask the void with frivolity, Fennell leaves the characters as mere shells of what they were intended to represent.

Fennell is known for her genre-bending, bold writing that allows for risky characterization. It is a skill I believe could have materialized the outright cruelty, abuse, and torment both Heathcliff and Cathy exhibit in the novel.

Several scenes skimmed the surface of the dark nature of the couple’s relationship and treatment of those around them. While I wanted to take the moments seriously, I was harshly drawn away as fellow audience members laughed at them. Scenes meant to display the cruelty, uncaring, destructive, vengeful disregard Heathcliff and Cathy have for everyone around them became mildly absurd laughing points for the audience.

Fennell’s colorblind casting for all the characters and thematic lustful focus turned a connection rooted in dominating ownership and destructive revenge into a shallow expression of yearning and miscommunication.

Elordi and Robbie’s characters were not the only characters shown a disservice. Edgar Linton, played by Shazad Latif, and Isabella Linton, played by Alison Oliver, were boiled down to weak romantic foils. 

In the novel, Edgar is the pinnacle of late 18th-century success: an attractive, wealthy white man of class and power. His status and appearance are central to the resentment and revenge Heathcliff enacts. However, casting Latif, a biracial actor of English and Pakistani descent, as Edgar while casting Elordi as Heathcliff reverses the racial narrative in a way that feels outright nasty.

Isabella, while performed wonderfully by Oliver, is stripped of any agency she possessed in the novel. She is one of the few characters who eventually breaks away from Heathcliff’s abuse; here, that growth is replaced by a submissive dog kink. 

Where the film succeeds as a visual spectacle, it fails as an adaptation. 

If Fennell’s ambition was to showcase Elordi and Robbie in a dark, lustful period piece, she should have made that movie independently. Using Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as a force for buzz does a disservice to the source material and the film itself.