© Warner Bros. Pictures
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights (2026)
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights (2026)
Make that “Wuthering Heights” in quotation marks, the film’s director Emerald Fennell insists. She explains that any movie adaptation of any novel, especially one as “dense and complicated” as Wuthering Heights, demands quotation marks. A film is not, never can be the accurate rendering of the book, just a version filtered through the director-writer’s sensibility, a set of quotes from the original, an emulation not the reality.
As an actor, Fennell played a role in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Anna Karenina (2012), however, that director did not insist on placing Tolstoy’s title between quotation marks. Interesting people have their quirks. While not a novice director, Fennell is probably best known stateside among British television fans for her parts in “Call the Midwife” and “The Crown.”
In a just published essay, Fennell rightly describes Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, as “maddeningly strange” and “all grain, all splinters.” Her film shows the strangeness and splinters. Like every two-hour cinematic adaptation of any novel, Fennell’s is a selected choice among characters and themes, a distillation as well as an interpretation, recast to suit the sensibility of the filmmaker and her era. “Wuthering Heights” empathizes with the heroine and the limited choices of women in earlier societies.
The film opens with a rude jolt of reality, a public hanging carried out in a festive, celebratory atmosphere complete with a puppet sideshow to entertain the children. Brontë’s heroine, Catherine, races home from the spectacle to her bilious father, given to anger, drunkenness and gambling. He’s a brute who feels the occasional tug of a frayed conscience. Out of what appears as a random act of kindness, he takes in a sullen, dirty-faced, nameless homeless boy Catherine’s age. “Oh, so you like your new friend?” father says. “I’ll call him Heathcliff after my dead brother!” Catherine announces.
Within a few quick scenes the bonds and boundaries of their relationship are established. Heathcliff is hard-headed and tends toward sullen on the sunniest days (and there aren’t many in rural Yorkshire). Catherine is bright and willful, a free spirit bordered by the prejudices of her class. Her family is decayed gentry; they own the land, but their coffers are empty. Catherine and Heathcliff come to care for each other in their way—and yet, is he her companion? Her foster brother? Or her servant? Will repressed desire rise to the surface?
Irked that their new neighbor, Edgar Linton, hasn’t called on them, Catherine decides to pay a visit. He is nouveau riche, a class beneath her own, but wealthy from the garment trade. Catherine walks to his splendidly appointed manor and peers over the garden wall at a scene straight from Jane Austen, complete with servants, high tea and an avid discussion between Edgar and his bookish teenage ward about Romeo and Juliet. Edgar’s comfortable affluence contrasts with her life in a drafty, dilapidated manor where candles and firewood are carefully rationed. Will she want to marry Edgar? What then with Heathcliff?
Emily Brontë was the anti-Jane Austen, and Fennell makes this clear through her lavishly visual depiction of Catherine’s grungy Old England, the wind whistling through the rotten wainscotting. She makes good use of a moody landscape that, when not soaked with rain or veiled in ground fog, is almost lunar in desolation.
The cast, led by Margot Robbie (I, Tonya) as a glowing yet frustrated Catherine, and Jacob Elordi (Priscilla) as a hunky Heathcliff, give it their all. “Wuthering Heights” is probably darker than the tastes of many Britbox-Austen fans and probably won’t make TCM viewers forget William Wyler’s 1939 film version, but it might send younger audiences toward a novel that still feels strangely wild, 180 years after it was written.
