So are we drinking the Wuthering Heights (now streaming on HBO Max, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) bathwater, or are we scowling at it in disgust? That’s the question of the day, my friends. Hot-button filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s third provocative outing after Saltburn and Promising Young Woman is a version of Emily Bronte’s 1847 all-timer of an English novel, albeit stripped down to bare bones covered in sweaty goosepimples. Fennell famously turned down $150 million from Netflix and took $80 million from Warner Bros. so the film could enjoy theatrical release, and the gamble worked – it was a $250-plus million worldwide hit, and its damp, soupy atmospherics (I’m guessing about $60 million of that budget went towards fog machines) and lush photography look even more stunning on a big screen. Oh, and so do its stars, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, who lick each other up and down more than I remember from the novel. Not that I remember much. It’s been a while. And that’s probably for the better in this case. [...]

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Different Brontë sister, but Cary Fukunaga’s spooky, horror-coded 2011 take on Jane Eyre is highly memroable. And Sophia Coppola is a clear influence – see the many brilliantly styled anachronisms in Marie Antionette. 

Performance Worth Watching: Of course Elordi and Robbie are magnetic, even in underwritten roles. But what a movie like this needs, and gets, is a weird little wacko supporting character who steals scenes like Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, and we get one in Oliver’s hilarious, screw-loose characterization of Isabella, whose every display of lovely decoupage inevitably looks like engorged human genitalia. Crafty girl, this one.

Sex And Skin: Buckets of it, although we see no bits, butts or boobs. 

Our Take: So: Are we slurping up Wuthering Heights or not? A little. Not heartily mind you, but Fennell heats up a frothy concoction that’s worth some sips, especially if you’re not a traditionalist potentially upset by significant alterations of the source material. Personally, I care not for authenticity of adaptation, and admire the audacity of Fennell’s interpretation, which indulges sloppy pig slaughter, big oozy snails leaving trails on windows, the slapping-flesh sounds of bread dough being kneaded, a pile of pink hairless pig’s feet that look like dicks, a couple instances of BDSM, a soundtrack heavy with Charli XCX, and the walls of Cathy’s bedroom at the Linton mansion, which are pink with freckles and delicately veiny, modeled after her luminescent skin. Fennell has never been afraid of getting fetishy with her films, but Wuthering Heights takes the cake and smashes it on everybody’s tits. So to speak.

This is Fennell feeding Masterpiece Theatre or Merchant-Ivory into the meat grinder. This is no stodgy period piece bursting with repressed yearning. Its throb ‘n’ heave is considerable, even if its horniness is somewhat restrained at times, a few hairs shy of going over the top. Of course, it’s still ridiculous, a story set in a universe where logic is less than nil and passion is all, and narrative and thematic sloppiness is a byproduct most of us can deal with, in the context of the director’s robust and sensual visual aesthetic. (What’s the movie “about”? Death, sex and weather, in the broadest terms.) This is absolutely gorgeous trash, Fennell roping us in with meticulous and rigorously conceptualized eye candy and rubbing our face in egg yolks, pig’s blood and assorted varieties of mucus or mucus-adjacent substances. 

You likely know the basic what-happens of the Wuthering plot, but not the how, and within that margin Fennell gets playful, gross, lusty and funny. There’s absolutely no way you’ll take a single second of this seriously; it’s sexual obsession transformed into a sort of deranged comedy, intentional or otherwise, and Elordi and Robbie, faced with sketchy and uninspired renderings of their characters, lean heavily into their ability to explode screens with concupiscence. Try as I might, I can’t argue against that. 

The punkish lack of respect for classical English lit means you won’t likely feel emotionally involved enough to sense the depths of Cathy and Heathcliff’s pain, considering how much thematic barley this movie harvests from skin. Just skin. Skin everywhere – beading up, blushing pink, scarred and bleeding, on faces and bosoms and backs, even the damn walls around this joint. (You might actually wish it went a little farther here in the era of best picture Oscar nominee The Substance.) Wuthering Heights is all blood, sweat and tears, but unlike Saltburn, no semen, surprisingly. Progress? Or regression? Yeah, no. Sure? Maybe. You tell me. Inevitably, the liquids run low, and the film doesn’t end, it just slowly bleeds out, like a hog with its throat slashed. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what Fennell does to the source material. But so fucking what?

Our Call: Wuthering Heights, wuthering blights on traditional literature. Approach it like it’s a very expensive soap opera and you’ll have a pretty damn good time. STREAM IT. (John Serba)

“Wuthering” is a Northern English term for a strong, roaring wind or a storm-lashed place, which is highly appropriate for Emily Brönte’s only novel – Cathy and Healthcliff’s tempestuous story of passion and revenge. It’s a harder sell for a holiday.

That hasn’t stopped ‘Moorcore’ from becoming the latest trend in UK breaks. And what is Moorcore? It's a move-on from the cutesy cottagecore vibe (all roses round the windows, thatched roofs and cats curled by the fire). It’s wild and free. The feeling of standing atop a gritstone edge, a heathery moorland vista stretching to the horizon, tumbling waterfalls, fairy glens, fresh air in your lungs.

There’s no better place to channel moorcore than on Haworth Moor – whose wild, heather-strews footpaths were well-traipsed by the Brontës. Two miles from their parsonage, Royds Hall Cottage is marked on maps from 1847, the very year Wuthering Heights published, and it’s likely it was a familiar sight for the sisters on their rambles. As we arrive, the breeze tusseling daffodils along the embankment and a buzzard hovering above, it feels magical. [...]

On an energetic five-and-a-half mile loop from the cottage front door, we took in the waterfall at Lumb Beck (detailed in Charlotte’s letters to her friend, Ellen) and the desolate farmhouse at Top Withens – said to be the setting for Cathy and Healthcliff’s home. From there, across the moorland paths we discovered the Fairy Kirk at Ponden Clough (‘Penistone Crags’ in the novel), and beautiful Ponden Hall, which Emily Brontë used as Edgar Linton’s Thrushcross Grange and where her sister Anne set The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Around Top Withens and the waterfall, there were scores of walkers admiring the famous views but, only a crow-call beyond, we saw barely a soul – just swooping curlews with their strange warbling cries and a roe deer bouncing off into the distance. It’s easy to find both wild inspiration and, afterwards, scones and clotted cream at Ponden Mill.

In the other direction, Haworth village was less than an hour’s stroll. It's the focal point of Brontë pilgrimage, so it was busy – yet still so beguiling, with a sense of the sisters at every turn. Visiting on foot meant we could skip the car park and enter the village – just as they would have – from the footpath at the end of Church Street.

Their house (now an unmissable museum) is the first you come to on the cobbled street. From the parlour table, the one Emily and her sisters worked at, you can still look out at the graveyard with its overcrowded, flat-lying gravestones. (Octavia Lillywhite)

Before dinner, I would usually mindlessly watch television but instead I lay a cotton cloth on the floor and enjoy an 1897 edition of Jane Eyre lent by a colleague.

I have hundreds of books but didn’t realise most paperbacks made after 1900 use adhesives and plastic laminate, unlike the good old days of animal-based glue and wheat starch paste. (Caitlin Cassidy)

   

This is a selection of songs inspired by several of Emily Brontë's poems recently published on Soundcloud, along with some AI visuals (you know, the usual slow motion, slightly creepy, and exceedingly cringey AI stuff)

Elli Belle

No Coward Soul is Mine

No Coward Soul is a modern reinterpretation of the emotional and philosophical world of Emily Brontë.

Blending indie rock, dark alternative, and atmospheric production, the album explores resilience, grief, identity, and quiet defiance.

Inspired by 19th-century poetry but rooted in a contemporary sound, this project reimagines the Brontë voice as something immediate, raw, and alive.

1 · House Upon the Moor

2 · Nothing Lovely Here - Stanzas - Emily Bronte

3 · Still I Remain

4 · Cold in the Earth

5 ·The Old Stoic

6 · I Will Not Bend

7 · Shadowed Grave

8 · No Coward Soul in Mine

9 · I Am Not Yours to Bury

   

Um personagem, múltiplas raças: a representação racial do Heathcliff nas adaptações de O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes (1939 e 2011)

Ellen Sayuri Okido Matsumoto, Giovanne Gabriel Ramos André, Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho" - UNESP

Intercom – Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação ,48º Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação – Faesa – Vitória – ES, September 2025

Este artigo analisa como a racialização do personagem Heathcliff nas adaptações cinematográficas de O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes (1939 e 2011) impacta a recepção e a interpretação da obra literária de Emily Brontë. Dialogando com os estudos de representação (Hall, 2003), outridade (Carneiro, 2005) e necropolítica (Mbembe, 2019), a pesquisa realiza uma análise comparativa entre as duas produções, observando como o apagamento ou a evidência da negritude de Heathcliff se inscreve na linguagem cinematográfica e nas leituras críticas da narrativa original. A pesquisa utiliza metodologia qualitativa de caráter bibliográfico e fílmico, com suporte teórico nas abordagens de adaptação (Stam, 2000; Andrew, 2000).  

   

Fans of period dramas - particularly those inspired by the brilliant Brontë sisters - are in for a real treat, as there's a little-known film being praised as the 'most authentic and real' portrayal of their lives.

Available to stream at no charge on BBC iPlayer, this underappreciated treasure has received rave reviews from all corners, with audiences left captivated by how accurate and genuine the narrative and its settings appear.

The majority of the film's shooting occurred on location in Haworth, West Yorkshire (where the sisters actually spent their childhood), and a three-storey, wooden life-size recreation of the Brontë Parsonage and its rooms was built with meticulous precision on Penistone Hill in Penistone Country Park, relatively near to the actual building's site.

To Walk Invisible initially aired in the UK on BBC One in December 2016 and in the US on PBS as part of the broadcaster's Masterpiece series in March 2017. Since its transmission, the film has received outstanding reviews, though it has remained somewhat of a hidden and underrated treasure. [...]

The drama's title derives from a letter that Charlotte Brontë penned to her publisher about an encounter with a clergyman who failed to recognise that she was the renowned Currer Bell.

Charlotte believed it served her and her sisters well that they remained unknown, as she expressed in her correspondence: "What author would be without the advantage of being able to walk invisible?" (Parul Sharma)