Was I entertained? Yes, actually. I didn’t long to leave my seat, and even found myself silently giggling over scenes that were clearly Elordi fanservice. “Was this in the book?’” a friend I watched it with (who actually has read the book) asked jokingly. No, reader, Heathcliff doesn’t have steamy sex with Catherine in the novel, nor does he take off his shirt to reveal glistening pecs and chest hair (spoiler alert). I suppose Fennell, and quite a few readers, wished he did, and that’s the crazy fantasy this film tries to bring forth. It’s a fairly good time at the movies if you show up with zero expectations beyond wanting to be occupied for a couple of hours. I just wish Fennell had ditched the title entirely and leaned into framing this as its own hideous, intriguing creature. 

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is clearly engineered as a strategic, box-office Valentine’s release, buoyed by its sanitized, more palatable rendering of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. We can’t fault her entirely for that: she’s hardly the first filmmaker to sand down Brontë’s rough edges. It’s a spectacle best experienced if you’re willing to surrender to it and ride the waves of its chaos rather than fight them. (Pilar Gonzalez)

 Everyone should watch this film. To see how Robbie and Elordi carry this damaged, feral love. To notice the care in every image, the intention behind every rough edge. And to sit with a version of Wuthering Heights that feels painful, deliberate, and deeply felt, one that stays long after the lights come up.

It’s dark and obsessive, gothic and damaged; not a love story, but a story of love torn apart, reclaimed, used, discarded, and haunting long after it’s gone. (Esha Aphale)

In her interpretation, Fennell dissects love and all its synonyms. The care. The admiration. The longing stares across rooms and stables. The steamy, breathless passion. The selflessness. And then the flip side — selfishness, jealousy, obsession, possessiveness, toxicity. It’s messy and destructive; dare I say, for some, it might even feel uncomfortably relatable. Not because we endorse the chaos, but because we recognise the intensity of loving someone who feels like they are stitched into your very being.
But let’s be clear: there is obvious underlying toxicity here, and at times it makes the film more provocative than romantic. There’s a particularly jarring moment where Heathcliff, driven by jealousy, manipulates and uses an innocent girl. She appears to indulge it, almost drawn to the danger, but the abruptness of it is horrifying. It’s uncomfortable to watch because it forces you to confront what certain emotions can bring out in people. (...)

I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a tale of obsessive, destructive love like this in a long time. Is it perfect? No. Is it subtle? Definitely not. But is it an experience, especially on Valentine’s weekend, when you're surrounded by pretty love stories? Absolutely. (Husain Rizvi)

Eye-catching but superficial. (...)  This ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a teenage sex dream that ends halfway through the book, which is maybe where 14-year-old Fennell stopped. In fact, in this version, neither Cathy nor Heathcliff have children, which means there can be no trauma passed on to the next generation, which is totally at the heart of this dark, complex, brutal novel that shouldn’t be a Valentine’s date, I promise you. Fennell’s treatment is eye-catching but superficial and because Robbie’s Cathy is like a capricious Scarlett O’Hara and Elordi’s Heathcliff is a hot boyfriend who broods, you can never buy into them as deeply connected soulmates. #TeamPurist all the way. (Deborah Ross)

You know what this issue is? It’s an Old Testament/New Testament problem. The Heathcliff in the first half of the novel is a brute, but a comprehensible one. His actions aren’t good, but they exist on a spectrum of human emotion that you can wrap your brain around. Yes, one would be furious if one overheard the love of one’s life tell someone else that marrying you would “degrade” her. Yes, it would suck badly if you went off to make the fortune required to be worthy in her eyes, but by the time you’d done it, she’d married someone else.

(We’re not going to speak of the mistreatment of Isabella’s dog, which also occurs in the first half. We’re going to assume Brontë understands she literally screwed the pooch on that one and would change it if she could.)

But Heathcliff’s malevolence really peaks in the second half of the novel, which I hadn’t remembered until I reread it last week. Catherine dies and there’s still 200 pages left. Heathcliff uses those 200 pages to ruin the lives of the next generation of Earnshaws and Lintons. He punishes Catherine’s daughter because her father was Edgar, not him. He punishes his own son because his mother was Isabella, not Catherine.

He repeats the abuse that he suffered as a child, he seizes property, he’s monstrous. Nobody gets a moment’s peace until he dies, a full three decades in the future.

The new movie doesn’t show any of this, nor do other cinematic adaptations. It cuts off at the novel’s midpoint and for good reason: because when Catherine dies, any sympathy we might have had for Heathcliff dies too. Now he’s not a sexy man propelled by love and longing, he’s an absolute weirdo who needs whatever the 19th century version of therapy is. (Leeches?)

The people who create posts on Reddit about Heathcliff being a monster seem to remember that the second half of the novel exists. The people who love him anyway might have done what I did: quietly forget it. Treat it as a collection of ideas for a sequel that somebody accidentally published. Treat it as apocrypha, not canon.

Treat it as the escapism your silly heart occasionally longs for. It’s fiction, after all — the idea that somebody is so madly in love with you that they would rather your decrepit, annoying ghost shamble after them for all eternity than live even one minute alone. (Monica Hesse)

Durran’s costumes are clever because they work psychologically, not just historically. Just like the movie. Emerald recently said the upcoming film is not tied to a specific, rigid time period, but rather acts as a "fantasy of a fantasy" that focuses on the emotional experience of the story rather than historical accuracy. 

Instead of romanticising the period, the clothes reflect power, repression, and emotional states. Catherine’s shifts in dress throughout the narrative mirror her movement between wildness and social constraint. The use of latex-looking fabrics and bold colour is genius because it quietly modernises Wuthering Heights without breaking its gothic core. The latex adds an unnatural sheen, suggesting control, restriction, and something almost suffocating, while the colour choices signal emotional states and power shifts rather than strict realism. Together, they make the characters feel trapped in their desires, turning costume into a visual language for obsession and repression instead of mere period accuracy. (Olivia Lower)

Cathy’s costumes in Fennell’s film veer into [William] Wyler territory often: she teases fellow character Isabella Linton about her doomed crush on Heathcliff in the Thrushcross Grange manor, while wearing a white tulle frock with velvet appliqué vines that looks strikingly similar to a dress actress Merle Oberon wore on-screen in 1939. Then there is the blood-red, velvet hooded cape and white fur hand-warmer Robbie wears when Cathy visits Wuthering Heights for the first time since marrying Edgar Linton. Oberon, too, donned a velvet, fur-trimmed hood and fur handwarmer in Wyler’s version. The number of jewels adorned on Robbie don’t look as out of place when you see Oberon wearing a near-identical tiara, drop earrings and floral diamond necklace some 87 years earlier.

“When I’m asked about why the costumes are a particular way, I find that really difficult to answer,” designer Durran said in London. “It’s a kind of instinctive, emotional reason.” Fennell agreed: “It’s not connected to the period, it’s connected to the emotional truth.” (...)

Ultimately, Fennell is referencing a period in history, just not 1847, when Brontë wrote the novel, and not the late 1700s, when it is set. By choosing her references from the big screen rather than history, she’s made a film for cinephiles, not the bookworms. The result might be as shallow as a puddle on a sunny day — but it certainly caught the light. (Leah Dolan)

 Of literature’s “three weird sisters”—as writer Ted Hughes famously dubbed the Brontës—Emily is the weirdest, probably because history knows so little about her. Sandwiched between bestselling Jane Eyre author Charlotte, the family’s press-savvy manager and myth-maker, and Agnes Grey writer Anne, the sweet and pious peacemaker, was Emily Jane, the elusive middle sister whose personality still evades readers nearly two centuries after her untimely death.

“The strange one,” as she’s often called, may have been autistic, antisocial, agoraphobic, and/or anorexic. She may have been a lesbian, or in an incestuous relationship with her brother. In any case, the author of Wuthering Heights—arguably the horniest Gothic novel ever written—was probably a virgin with a vivid imagination. As a soaking-wet Heathcliff on horseback rides over wild moors and onto movie theatre screens yet again in Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of the novel, here are some burning questions biographers are still asking about the strangest Brontë sister. (...)

Modern armchair psychologists have inevitably diagnosed Emily Brontë with a revolving door of diseases and disorders, from “neurosis” to agoraphobia to social anxiety to—the most popular pick of recent years—neurodivergence or autism. “She was probably somewhere on the spectrum, like lots of people are,” says Brontë biographer Nick Holland. “Autism would certainly explain a lot.” But the meaning, if any, of a modern-day diagnosis is debatable. “The idea of autism didn’t even exist in the 19th century,” says [Deborah] Lutz, “so it’s not very helpful.” (...)

But Branwell was one of so few men in Emily Brontë’s world that historians have considered him to be a possible inspiration for Heathcliff, Catherine’s adopted brother turned love interest. Another possibility is William Weightman, the flirtatious curate with whom the 2022 film Emily imagined a torrid affair. Robert Heaton was a neighbour said to have planted Emily a pear tree, which embarrassed her. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argued Emily was a lesbian, and she herself is Heathcliff—yearning for love she cannot have.

Another once perfectly reasonable explanation for the Brontës’ monstrous literary talent? Witchcraft. Ted Hughes likened the trio to “three weird sisters,” the witches whose prophecy begins Macbeth—invoking an old theory with deep roots. “That they were witches with some kind of elemental power came from the late 19th-century idea that women couldn’t be intellectuals or craftswomen, they were just channels receiving and transmitting information,” says [Graham] Watson. It’s “all nonsense, of course,” he adds, though perhaps not entirely undeserved—Emily was eternally fascinated with superstition and the occult. (...)

Even after she got sick, Emily went about her days as she always did, such that no one realized how close she was to death. Legend says she refused to retire to her bed, as is customary, and died on the sofa in the dining room instead. True or not, some 80,000 Brontë devotees still visit annually their former home in Haworth, now a Brontë museum, to see the sofa that once held the strangest Brontë—a defiant enigma until her very end. (Rosemary Counter)

Ara explores why 'yearning' has become fashionable in series and cinema. Marie Claire explores the (many, many) differences between the Wuthering Heights 2026 film and book. Daily Mail goes straight ahead for the good stuff: How racy is the film and let's dissect all the raunchy scenes. Secret Manchester and The National explore some of the shooting locations of the film. The Toronto Star interviews Emerald Fennell.