So I watched Wuthering Heights 2026 for the first time last night. Okay no, that’s kind of a lie. I started watching it like a week ago, but then my power went out at like the 30 minute mark and stayed out for a week. But I finally finished it last night and yeah, everyone was right, it’s not good.
(P.S. You can read a slightly condensed version of this review on Letterboxd. Follow me there for in depth reviews of almost every movie I watch.)
The first glaring issue with this movie is Heathcliff’s whiteness. This has been talked about again and again, and I’m gonna talk about it again again. There is no race commentary in this movie. I’m assuming Fennell just didn’t understand (or remember, because apparently she hasn’t read the book since she was a teenager) the racial themes in the original but its literally integral to Heathcliff’s personality. He is meant to be isolated, othered, and seen as low because of his race. In this, he is white, so he has almost no reason to feel isolated, but he IS isolated, just... for seemingly no reason. Earnshaw brought him in apparently to make him a gentleman, like he reveals later in the movie, so why is he a servant? There isn’t really justification for his alienation and his lowly reputation, is just is, I guess because Fennell remembered Heathcliff as vaguely brooding and angsty so he must be brooding and angsty.
Upon even the slightest inspection, this movie is quite racist. Heathcliff is white, which could just be Emerald Fennel failing to recall the racial themes in the source material, but Edgar Linton is played by a Pakistani actor. The erasure of Heathcliff’s race is an issue on it’s own, but even further than being a white man, he is a white man posed in direct opposition to and competition with a man of color. The idea of a not white man sort of stealing the white woman from the white man that she is actuallyyyy in love with is kind of... uncomfortable. The only other non-caucasian character in the movie is Nelly, and she is posed as an antagonist who is ALSO trying to keep Catherine and Heathcliff apart. Don’t like it.
The second glaring issue is the omission of Hindley. In the book, Hindley was another reason for Heathcliff to feel alienated. He hated him and abused him for “stealing” his father’s love, and this is what kicks off the theme of familial abuse and generational trauma. I guess Earnshaw serves this role in the movie, but it makes almost zero sense. Why does Earnshaw abuse Heathcliff if he was the one that chose to take him in? No reason for his abuse, no reason for Heathcliff’s alienation. What’s going on? In his later years, his evil is only inspired by anger at how Catherine has treated him, instead of general anger at the world like in the book, which makes it a loooot less interesting.
The third issue is less of a blatant problem and more of a disappointment, but this movie is legitimately not sexy. I think Fennell really really wants to make sexy freaky erotic movies, but she’s not actually horny. The sexual elements are vanilla when they think they’re boundary breaking, and they’re extremely oddly, ineffectively, or just downright offensively handled. I talked a little bit about my problems with how Fennell handles shock sexuality in my Saltburn review, and this movie is no different. It is in your face, but it’s not truly crazy. It’s in sort of an uncanny valley between out there and hidden. Catherine has a sort of sexual awakening when watching two of her servants have kinky sex, but her sex with Heathcliff is completely vanilla (and literally always fully clothed) and BDSM is posed as something deviant and mentally ill, as in the case of Isabella, which I’ll talk about later. Fennell is sort of a freaky larper. She wants to project the image of a freak, but she doesn’t want to wear the collar. The collar is for weirdos, perverts, servants in the hay, but certainly not her. So instead of making the sex between the two main love interests actually freaky, she haphazardly inserts scenes of chaste slimes and goops that look kind of like bodily secretions when zoomed in and also Catherine sticks her finger in a fish. At least Oliver from Saltburn actually had sex with something weird.
Before I continue tearing into this movie, I want to give it a few points. The scene where Isabella is about to tell Catherine who is being hanged at the hanging she wants to go to and Catherine thinks it will be Heathcliff until Isabella says “It is a woman!” is extremely tense and effective. Fennell also has a clear talent for visuals and lots of the shots in this movie are incredibly beautiful. I also love the costuming, as controversial as it is. I love the outfit she wears when she goes to visit her father, the huge cross and candy red cape. I really liked the scene where Catherine comes to Wuthering Heights to see her dead father and there are huge, almost Seussian piles of bottles up against the corners of the room. I don’t know why I liked that so much, but I did. I liked the skin wall too but I wish they did something more interesting with it.
Okay now the titular problem, which is Isabella. In the book, Isabella was quite empowered. She was physically and mentally abused by Heathcliff and was trapped in Wuthering Heights against her will after marrying him, but she escapes and leads a full life, raising her son on her own completely separated from her abuser. Her story is one of freedom and recovery after domestic abuse.
In the movie, Isabella is childish, infantilized, dressed in pastel tulle and ribbons and constantly playing with dolls. I don’t really know why this is but I think Fennell was trying to make her seem mentally stunted in some way, or mentally ill. She is also a masochist and into pet play? She marries Heathcliff and, instead of being abused, she enters a... consensual BDSM relationship with him. I want to mention that Isabella is almost exactly like Lee from Secretary. The childlike self-harming masochist. Heathcliff even makes her write letters for him and that is part of their sexual charade. I feel like Secretary is the only movie featuring BDSM that Fennell has ever watched. Anyway...
Turning an abused woman into a masochistic woman is obviously problematic in its own right, and even worse when that woman originally was pretty inspiring and took back her autonomy from her abuser completely. She has become sort of complicit in her own abuse, and ohhh the stripping of her autonomy was her thing actually yeahhh she wanted that. Extremely weird. There’s actually a very extended scene in which Heathcliff asks for Isabella’s consent before engaging in sex, repeatedly asking “Do you want me to stop?” before and while taking her dress off. I assume Fennell did all this because she wanted Heathcliff to still be the main romantic interest, and therefore couldn’t be too evil, so he couldn’t be a domestic abuser because that is one of the topics excluded from the list of acceptable “morally grey” traits a love interest can have. He does talk about “finding a match in degradation” with Isabella and the movie kind of hints at Heathcliff being somehow morally bereft because he enjoys sadism, which I don’t really like the implications of. Mild sadism is, I guess, to Fennell, a way to show us that Heathcliff enjoys violence in a very safe way, without actually being violent. He enjoys violence, but consentual violence. She both uses BDSM as a safeguard and condemns it by implying that sexual sadism is indicative of some deeper moral corruption. She could have avoided that by making Heathcliff like, actually violent, but she would never have done that. This leads us to the root of most of the movie’s flaws (not including the racism):
Emerald Fennell just wanted to make a romance. She did not want to make a real adaption of Wuthering Heights, she didn’t want to make a story about generational trauma or the cycle of abuse or how disastrous love can be. She wanted to make a forbidden romance movie, which isn’t a crime, but she shouldn’t have called it Wuthering Heights. Inspired by Wuthering Heights, fine, but Wuthering Heights it is not. And I’m not saying that the end all be all for adaptations is accuracy, I really liked Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that movie wasn’t accurate to the book at all, but if you’re going to change a bunch of stuff you have to make sure you handle it well and this movie just doesn’t. Fennell removed traits, events, and characters without removing their effects on the characters and plot, so you have Heathcliff’s source-less brooding. She removed things without thinking about why they were there in the first place, so she ended up with a weird and confusing set of characters that do things seemingly for no reason. I think it’s just generally a terrible idea to make an adaptation of a book that you haven’t read for 20 years. I would’ve been way more fine with this movie if it wasn’t pretending to be Wuthering Heights. Then it would’ve just been a sort of bad and kinda racist romance movie, but it’s not, it’s a Wuthering Heights adaptation, and putting the title in quotes doesn’t really remove it from that identity… at all.
So, final verdict, it was bad. Riveting reveal I know. Fennell is constantly trying to take on more than she can handle and constantly failing miserably. I think she has an amazing eye for visuals but she should not be a writer. Perhaps a music video director? Arranging videos to music seems to be her true passion, considering how many damn montages are in her movies. Anyway, don’t watch it. You can spend 2 hours of your time doing something much better instead. If you want an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, listen to the Kate Bush song.
