Maya Hoover/The Mossy Log
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026) is a sex movie that is not sexy, a horror movie that is not horrifying and a book adaptation that does not adapt the book. The film takes many of the liberties typical of a book adaptation: minor characters are cut, and complicated plot elements are sanded down to their most crucial components. From its first scene, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” makes clear that adherence to the source material is not its chief aim.
The film opens on a morbid bacchanal, where a raucous crowd celebrates “hanging day” — a festival where a public execution is followed by an all-ages revelry: dolls for the kids, adults engaging in public sex acts and old women in a knitting circle. This commingling of sex and death is fittingly disturbing, especially through the transfixed eyes of a young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington). While this scene thematically pays homage to the novel, it does so without follow-through.
The darkest elements of the novel — the all-consuming obsession of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, the violent husbands and fathers, the isolation and mystery — inspire the “vibe” of Fennell’s retelling. The film suggests it will explore the gruesome details of these themes and embraces them in its stylistic language, but does not deliver any meaningful insight into the subject matter.
Emily Brontë’s novel has a lot to say about power dynamics between men and women, and has many explicit scenes of domestic violence between spouses and family members. The film tries its hand at such moments, but fails to understand the purpose of violence as a narrative tool. An early scene in the film shows a young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) lying on Catherine’s behalf, taking the blame for the pair’s lateness to their father’s birthday dinner. We hear Mr. Earnshaw whip Heathcliff from behind the door that has been shut to prevent Cathy from intervening.
This scene intends to communicate that Heathcliff is so protective of Catherine that he will take an unearned beating to save her from what may well have been a less severe punishment. The young boy’s heroics set up the first scene of emotional intimacy between the pair, but the scars’ primary purpose seems to be giving viewers our first look at a shirtless Jacob Elordi as the adult Heathcliff. Elordi’s Heathcliff does not read as a traumatized victim of childhood abuse. In that sense, the scars are only skin-deep, serving a romanticized image of a rugged, damaged hero with a tragic backstory that makes him all the more attractive.
In the film, Mr. Earnshaw is an abusive alcoholic whose condition deteriorates throughout the first act due to drinking and gambling addictions. His acts of violence are random, spurred by intoxication and a hypermasculine need to retain control as head of the household. He seems to be driven primarily by cruelty, which I find to be a deeply uninteresting character motivation.
In the novel, Mr. Earnshaw loves his adopted son. Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, resents this, bullying and abusing Heathcliff for usurping his father’s favor. In that dynamic, violence has a narrative function — Hindley is trying to enforce what he sees as a natural hierarchy, where the firstborn son is heir to his father’s estate and assets. Thus, the violence provides the reader insight into the family dynamics and cultural context of the time, as well as a character motivation for Heathcliff in adulthood, none of which are present in the film.
Now, to address the 6 feet, 5 inch Australian elephant in the room: Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff, which has been controversial to say the least. In Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff’s race is left intentionally mysterious. He is described as a “dark-skinned,” “American or Spanish castaway” with whom Mr. Earnshaw returns from a trip to Liverpool, Britain’s main port city in the transatlantic slave trade.
While the specifics of his national origin remain unknown, it is evident that Brontë’s Heathcliff is not white, an element that creates one of a number of externally imposed wedges between him and Catherine. One motivation for Hindley’s resentment is that, as a nonwhite adoptee, Heathcliff ought to be beneath him.
This explicitly racial element of Heathcliff’s sense of inferiority is a crucial factor in the story’s central conflict. In the novel, Heathcliff expresses his despair at the impossibility of a now adult Catherine (Margot Robbie) choosing him over her soon-to-be husband, Edgar Linton, saying, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!”
The central conflict of the film, the “barrier” keeping Heathcliff and Cathy apart, is trivialized in Fennell’s adaptation. The racial impropriety and incestuous taboo of their relationship in the novel are stripped away, leaving the pair free to have as much clothed and painfully conventional sex as they can get away with.
The sex scenes that earned the film its Galentine’s Day release date and promised a fun, sexy girls’ night flick were tragically disappointing. For a movie that repeatedly promises a story about sex and whose pre-release press primed audiences for a kinky, sex-charged retelling of the Gothic classic, the sex in this movie does not have a lot to say.
In terms of storytelling, the sex scenes give the audience no new insight into the characters or their relationships. The sexual encounters between Catherine and Heathcliff are shown primarily in an aesthetically indulgent montage which never dwells on the details. The film’s supposed commitment to transgressive boundary-pushing is nowhere to be found in its central romance, which boils down to a typical paperback bodice ripper with Fabio on the cover.
When Heathcliff eventually marries Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) to spite Catherine, the couple quickly establishes a mutually consensual BDSM dynamic that is left unexplored by the plot. In one scene, Isabella wears a dog collar on a chain, which Heathcliff reveals is not even anchored to the wall. Again, this implies some sort of eroticized violence but offers nothing in the way of character development.
The grotesque details of Brontë’s novel — the domestic violence, the incestuous lust, the graphic depictions of illness and injury — all serve a purpose to the story. Brontë certainly cultivates a “vibe” in setting the Gothic tone, but her aesthetic sensibility is not the primary reason for any of these elements. For Fennell, aesthetic is everything, and the implication of storytelling is sufficient to carry the over two-hour runtime.
To be sure, the film’s visuals are stunning. The set design (Charlotte Dirickx), costuming (Jacqueline Durran) and cinematography (Linus Sandgren) are sure to be favorites during the 2027 awards season. Just about any out-of-context screencap from the film would make an excellent addition to a Pinterest board or aesthetic Instagram grid. But underneath the production value, there is little to be found. Red symbolizes blood and lust. The skin room (I cannot even begin to get into the skin room) signifies Catherine’s sensuality surrendering to her husband and his estate. The piled-up liquor bottles in Mr. Earnshaw’s room represent his alcoholism. The darkness may as well represent darkness.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is, in a word, obvious. Its attempts to develop the themes of Brontë’s novel are shallow and half-hearted, relying on aesthetics and shock value to distract the viewer from its lack of anything interesting to contribute. The film’s cardinal sin is not its divergence from the source material but its betrayal of the spirit of Brontë’s novel. Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is genuinely transgressive — its unorthodox plot structure, confusingly tangled family tree, and commentary on gender, race and class made it a first-of-its-kind Gothic romance that continues to disturb and captivate readers to this day. Fennell’s film suggests, implies and masquerades as an evocative subversion of the romance genre that is unafraid to gross out and creep out audiences. Instead, it borrows the language and aesthetic of Gothic horror while shying away from substantive commentary on the very themes it seeks to emulate.
But maybe this is all a case of overanalysis. As the film’s casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, told Deadline, “…you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book.”
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