It’s perhaps no coincidence that John Cale appears on the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s sado-masochistic take on Emily Brontë’s famous gothic romance Wuthering Heights, which is not so much reimagined as brutally mugged in a dark alley. With their sexually provocative songs about whips, furs and love not given lightly, Cale’s edgy ’60s outfit the Velvet Underground would appear to be a touchstone here, a far cry from Andrea Arnold’s muddy, almost insufferably miserable adaptation from 15 years ago. In short, the new Wuthering Heights is about as faithful to the 1847 novel as Kate Bush’s hit song of the same name was, which, let’s face it, is as much as most people know about it. Bowing to popular demand, Fennell’s lackluster film doesn’t really bother with the stylistic flourishes of the source — this is really just the Cathy and Heathcliffe show, two awful people competing to destroy each other and threatening to take us to hell with them into the bargain.
It begins promisingly enough with a very dark joke: what appears to be sounds of love-making — lots of heavy breathing and creaking wood — turns out to be a man being hung in a town square, to the delight of the bystanders. With this, Fennell immediately seems to be leaning into the death cult surrounding the Brontë sisters, who all died young (allegedly from drinking contaminated graveyard water). Sex and death will feature heavily in the next two hours, and Fennell wastes little time in introducing us to the young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) and her newly adopted brother, Heathcliff (Owen Cooper). The two become inseparable, to the dismay of Cathy’s paid companion Nelly (Vi Nguyen), and only become closer after Heathcliff takes a beating on Cathy’s behalf from her alcoholic father (Martin Clunes) for missing his birthday celebration.
Fast-forward, and both are adults. Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is a lowly, illiterate stable boy, and the Earnshaw family are on their uppers. Mr. Earnshaw spends his nights drinking and gambling, leaving his maids to clean up the pools of vomit, urine and feces in his wake. Cathy (Margot Robbie), meanwhile, becomes obsessed with the fancy new family that has moved into an adjacent mansion and stalks them when they decline to visit, twisting her ankle in the process.
Taken in by Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his ward Isabella (Alison Linton), Cathy becomes enamored of their luxurious lifestyle, alienating Heathcliff, who decamps to make his fortune after overhearing Cathy tell Nelly that “it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff.” So, Cathy takes up with Edgar, and is just about becoming resigned to her loveless marriage when Heathcliff returns, having transformed himself (somehow) into a brooding Regency dandy. Heathcliff begins seeing Cathy behind Edgar’s back, and that really is the bulk of the movie, culminating in Heathcliff taking the nuclear option by marrying Isabella.
There’s lots of snogging but, after the excesses of Saltburn, the sex is surprisingly chaste, most of it left to the imagination. Neither is the script terribly funny, given what we might expect given Fennell’s famous black humor. Instead, it doesn’t ever really settle, moving from the Earnshaws’ decrepit home (the estate that gives the film its title) to the Lintons’, alternating austere, brutalist locations with beautiful but soullessly decorative sets that would be dismissed, respectively, as a bit too much by Robert Eggers and not enough by Melania Trump, whose Winter White Houses the Linton pile mostly resembles.
Most puzzling of all is the weird absence of any significant oomph; it’s simply watched from afar by Nelly (now Hong Chau), who is always being fired but never seems to leave, in by far the most thankless role in the movie. A key stumbling block is Heathcliff’s thick Yorkshire accent, which is about as erotic as phone sex with Ozzy Osbourne, but an even bigger problem is that from the midpoint on, Fennell’s film has played its entire hand and lurches to an end almost entirely bereft of subtext. Top hats off, then, to Clunes as the only complex character in the movie; too bad that, once Mr. Earnshaw is killed off, death for everyone within a five-mile radius begins to seem like a very enticing prospect.
Title: Wuthering Heights
Distributor: Warner Bros
Release date: February 13, 2026
Director: Emerald Fennell
Screenwriter: Emerald Fennell, from the novel by Emily Brontë
Cast: Margo Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Martin Clunes, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver
Running time: 2 hr 16 mins
English (US) ·