This is not the Victorian England in which the Brontës lived, nor the feel-good fairytale land of modern streaming service bodice-rippers, which gloss the genre over with a veneer as hot as a season’s greetings card from Hallmark. Nay, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights lives in a seething, ancient decrepit place that only existed in the movies of yore, and in its best moments she transports viewers back to the kind of sweeping spectacle that can beguile and enrapture. At one point upon “moving up” in the world, Margot Robbie’s vain and capricious Cathy Earnshaw even enters a new bedroom that literalizes the basic conceit of German Expressionism, with the walls painted by her dithering husband to resemble her freckled skin.
The sumptuous designs—derived from what must be the fevered dreams of production designer Suzie Davies, costumer Jacqueline Durran, and cinematographer Linus Sandgren—conspire, casting a spell so blinding in its orgy for the eyes that it even distracts from whatever litany of sins the movie might conceal. Which for English professors and purists of the page, will surely be legion.
This is immediately apparent after the aforementioned opening prologue at a hanging witnessed by a young, nameless boy who will one day soon be known as Heathcliff (Owen Cooper as a child, Jacob Elordi for the rest of the picture). Gone is the framing device about a ghost on the moors and a lost love. This Wuthering Heights is instead a pitch black fairytale about a boy and a girl, with only the morality of the Marquis de Sade between them. Heathcliff is a wild, feral thing, who earns his name after he is adopted (stolen, really) by a drunk and hateful man from generations of squandered wealth, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes).
Earnshaw brings the boy home to his dying house on the moors, and to his daughter Cathy (initially Charlotte Mellington), whom he allows to name the vagrant. Young Cathy also quite visibly falls in love with the lad, despite the cruel patriarch using young Heathcliff as both a servant and glorified whipping boy. The old man even savors denying the child an education in basic reading and writing. Somehow, despite this unhappy childhood, Heathcliff grows up to be the strapping Elordi while Cathy blossoms into Margot Robbie at her most bewitching. As adults, the infatuation between Cathy and Heathcliff is inescapable to everyone. Yet they will not consummate.
Cathy is acutely, selfishly, aware of her beauty, and the effect it has on Heathcliff as well as the new neighbor, poor, clueless Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Mr. Linton and his young, impressionable ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) have moved into the luxurious estate across the moors, Thrushcross Grange, where every room is bedecked in crystal or pastels more perfect than the six-foot dollhouse Isabella has brought with her. In short order, Cathy has a marriage proposal from the kind but diffident wealthy man, and a choice to make between the desires of her heart—and flesh—which lean toward the dark, brooding silhouette of Elordi’s six-and-a-half foot frame, and Edgar’s comforts. Yet it is what occurs after she errs, causing Heathcliff to abandon the range for five years before returning as a man of mysterious wealth, where the real duplicities and depravity begin.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is less an adaptation of the novel than it is a lascivious daydream of what every young, repressed non-reader imagines when staring up at its stylized title on a dorm room wall, or while listening to the spooky synths of Kate Bush crooning about running along ‘em moors. It is Fifty Shades of Technicolor Rouge, wherein each fetid desire, and implicit moral corruption that’s simply suggested on the page, is made achingly, swooningly vivid in a movie that jettisons the multigenerational degradation and even supernatural underpinnings of the book in favor of an epically bad romance.
date:2026-02-09 20:00:00
Related reading