Emerald Fennell’s attempt at Wuthering Heights is a jagged reimagining that audiences will find either audaciously intoxicating or deceitfully repulsive. An astonishing period piece that re-dresses Emily Brontë’s legacy as an exploration of provocative romance, it is a shallow rendering of the ruinous attraction between Catherine and Heathcliff.
Thwarted by the phantom of its source, the retelling is an arresting, often irritating watch that sacrifices narrative depth for a fleeting sense of sensual eroticism.
Architecture of a gilded cage
Succeeding the stunning visuals of her previous works, many of Fennell’s triumphs as a director are rooted in her visual precision. With the dark decay of the Heights and the surreality of Thrushcross Grange, the movie renders isolation within the throat of opulence as a visceral suffocation. Animated like a designer dollhouse, the Grange is a pastel daydream that accentuates Catherine as a soul trapped within the socialite lifestyle. This includes a “skin room” with walls modeled after Margot Robbie’s complexion, a succinct representation of being constrained in her own skin.
This juxtaposition culminates when Catherine, draped in a blood-red coat, revisits the Heights. She appears as a violent flash of excess sheened against the murky, mud-stained remains of her past, fully detaching her from the only place she truly belonged.
Between these two worlds lie the moors—a hazy, wind-swept atmosphere that dissolves the boundaries between Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance. While mirroring the novel’s rugged aesthetic, the film deliberately stylizes these visuals to punctuate paramount moments. Set against suffocating fog, crimson sunsets, and fleeting sunlight, the moors are an expression of internal turmoil and carnal desire.
The film’s costuming, while anachronistic by nature, is also its most defiant statement. Catherine’s domineering palette of red and white hues evokes a trinity of violence, passion, and sexuality, framing her as an impressionable protagonist who articulates her emotions through clothing.
The erasure of Catherine’s humanity materializes as she dons a latex-wrapped dress for Edgar, a spirited woman repackaged as a prize. Scenes of married life reveal a silent exhibition of luxury, strangled in high-gloss Victorian Swiss outfits and Marie Antoinette-inspired bodices. However, as the film concludes, these textures melt into a deathly translucence; the once bold crimsons are bleached into a stagnancy that blends into the skin-toned void of her surroundings. Catherine remains a hollow version of her vibrant past, consumed by the weight of her love.
Tightening the corset of convention
From rain-soaked confessions to bodice-ripping confrontations, Wuthering Heights reimagines Brontë’s classic as a whirlwind romance. But while the novel famously reveals the structural decay of the moors, Fennell’s adaptation devolves into a hedonistic reverie dissonant with the source’s visceral commentary.
Throughout the film’s promotional run, the quotation marks that enclose the title served as a foreboding omen—a proactive disclaimer for the film’s limitless creative liberty, and a form of self-absolution from the responsibilities of a faithful adaptation.
Among the production’s most controversial departures was the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff’s status as a “dark-skinned” character of ambiguous ethnicity exposes the racial prejudice and rigid class structures that underlie the mechanisms of generational trauma. By surrendering the pivotal role to a white lead, the film bleaches the character of history. What ensues is a sanitized, revisionist void where there should have been the searing dissection of racial inequality.
Trading social critique for shock value, Fennell’s loose retelling focuses exclusively on the romance despite its secondary role in the novel. As she weaves together sexual liberation and tortured love, she challenges the skewed asymmetry of gender and power. Yet, while the production attempts a more feminist reinvention, the film’s focus on the female body is a cruel, public sentencing to degradation and martyrdom.
In her untethered youth, Catherine is empowered to explore the frontiers of her sexuality. But as she passes in a river of red pooled from her genitals, audiences are forced to watch as she is condemned by the very body she was told to embrace. On the other hand, where Brontë’s Isabella stood as a monument of resilience against Heathcliff’s abuse, the film’s fractured interpretation reduces her to nothing more than a sexual puppet, a willing participant relishing in her own objectification.
Despite claiming a contemporary narrative, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights ultimately struggles to carve a unique voice against patriarchal and conservative conventions. For all its grandeur and visual opulence, the film is merely a resplendent husk of a story—one that captures the shimmer of a romance but loses the visceral pulse of Brontë’s critique.
Tattered foundations lay bare
Skepticism surrounding the film’s execution predated its premiere. The announcement of electro-pop icon Charli XCX’s soundtrack album for the film drew divisive opinions. While tonally lush, the rich orchestral symphonies mirrored the adaptation’s picturesque yet shallow essence. The soundtrack leaves little to the imagination. Tracks like Chains of Love, Dying for You, and House pierce the narrative with lyrically blunt literalism—smothering the listener’s capacity for personal explication.
The tracks reflect Catherine’s arrest—confined in a room walled by her flesh—damned to feel imprisoned beneath her own skin. Blind to the irony that her suffocating insecurity would ultimately lead to her own imprisonment, she is doomed to a life shackled to Edgar as a glimmering centerpiece among their home’s opulent embellishments. Her illusory liberation lies in the blindsiding return of Heathcliff, a catalyst that prompts Catherine to break free of spousal chains and begin a series of philandering trysts. She revels in this newfound but distorted autonomy with Heathcliff, fulfilling a carnal desire that Edgar’s pristine chambers could never satiate.
The film attempts to frame the estranged pair’s intimate liaisons as the dawn of Catherine’s independence. In truth, the affair only plunges her deeper into the abyss of objectification, no longer only used as Edgar’s radiant keepsake, but now as Heathcliff’s sexual commodity. The writing eroticizes Catherine’s proclivity towards her own exploitation, fetishizing the surrender of her autonomy as a bid to feel desired and valued. It perpetuates a regressive narrative that women indulge in their oppression, as long as it is done under the guise of love.
Catherine’s tragic demise is foreshadowed by this infrangible attachment; by dwelling in Heathcliff’s misfortune, she yields to a state of complete avolition at the peril of herself and her unborn child. Her self-abandonment exposes the credulous nature of her bond with Heathcliff—a partnership that should not be viewed as star-crossed lovers thwarted by fate, but as a destructive romance built on lecherous pining.
Fennell’s retelling is a visually captivating reimagination, yet it is a stark departure from Brontë’s penetratingly deep classic. Like Catherine herself, the beauty the film offers is intrinsically flat, attempting to atone for its superficiality through immersive cinematography and artistic scores. The adaptation’s surface-level adornments fail to veil the crude and dehumanizing portrayal of this so-called “love story.” Beneath the film’s beauty, a rotten core emanates through every provocative scene, glorifying the mistreatment of women and reveling in a fetishistic fixation on their agony. As a blight in Fennell’s repertoire of otherwise stunning cinematography, Wuthering Heights comes to embody the worst ethos of modern book-to-movie adaptations: frivolous, depthless storytelling that leaves audiences wanting less.
Rating: 2.0/4.0
