Redressing — and, in this case, undressing — the classics can be risky business. At best, as with daring new stagings of standard rep operas, new insights can grace familiar works. Fennel’s adventure in rethinking a landmark tale ends up being something of a hit-and-miss, bump-and-grind affair. (Josef Woodard)

A veces, uno tiene la sensación de estar frente a un spot publicitario de dos horas y cuarto, porque la factura técnica es impecable y tendente al excesivo esteticismo, aunque la oscuridad se apodere de las atmósferas fotográficas en determinados pasajes.

No obstante, se nota ese intento de darle un estilo autoral a esta producción que no deja de ser gran formato, más centrada en lo formal que en el fondo de la cuestión y en profundizar en los personajes. (Manuel Ángel Jiménez) (Translation)

Wuthering Heights on Screen Seminar Day with Sam Hirst

Sat 28 Mar, 10:00am

The Brontë Space at the Old School Room

This full-day workshop explores the adaptation history of Wuthering Heights, from the lost 1920 film to the most recent adaptation. You will have the chance to explore the archive collection of behind-the-scenes materials. 

The day will be divided into three workshops:

• The first will explore early productions, including the lost 1920 film and the 1939 classic, and their impact on later adaptations.
• The second session will explore the history of Wuthering Heights on the small and large screen, looking at the ways it won its reputation as a romance, exploring behind-the-scenes details of production, and investigating how different adaptations faced the challenges of adapting the complex novel.
• The final session will explore international adaptations of Wuthering Heights from Medieval Japan to 20th-century France, looking at how a quintessentially Yorkshire novel was translated to different contexts.

A woollen sculpture created by an artist whose installations feature in the latest Wuthering Heights film is to go on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Time's Scythe, a "site-responsive installation" by artist Nicola Turner, uses wool from the British Wool Board in Bradford and will be on display from Saturday.

Turner is putting the finishing touches to the work, which will see an 18th-Century chapel at the Wakefield park covered in wool and horsehair.

She said she was inspired by the landscape and "energy" of the chapel and its rural surroundings.

"My material, which includes locally sourced wool, will pull, weave and grasp through the space with the final form emerging as I work in situ with the YSP team," she said. [...]

Turner's works appear in the Emerald Fennell version of Wuthering Heights, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and was released in February.

Her large woollen sculptures hang from the walls and roofs of Wuthering Heights, the moorland house in which Cathy and Heathcliffe [sic] are raised. (Grace Wood)

I left Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” feeling nothing. It was a visually pretty movie with unconventional costumes and two attractive leads, but it did not address race, class and gender roles the way the novel masterfully does.

Fennell stripped away what made the book so compelling and instead created pallid fanfiction. The fact that many others feel the same goes to show that we want stories to meaningfully engage with us.

Despite my negative feelings toward Fennell’s adaptation, the movie left me with hope. This decade has brought notable movie adaptations of classic novels — Emma, the Dune series, and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”, to name a few.

“Wuthering Heights” reminds audiences what made those previous adaptations successful. The directors kept the essence of the novel while adding a few authentic touches. Fennell’s failure to do this sets a higher standard for adaptations of classics that online discourse has made loud and clear: Get the themes right. (Paula Milian)

Emerald Fennell’s unhinged version of “Wuthering Heights” is surely to be divisive. There’s a reason why the film’s poster displays the title in quotation marks. Those who are loyal to the novel might be jarred by the composition of this rendition, while casual movie watchers might be enthralled by the overall spectacle. What’s certain is that this is a dark, tragic and overwhelming experience. Amidst the highly stylized presentation is a story of dangerous and toxic love that envelops everything around it. I found it haunting me for days after I saw it. (Zach Murphy)

Perhaps, to avoid losing the meaning in adaptations, we might expand our definition from one of fidelity to one that includes artistic license. Those who are inspired by a work of art and set out to adapt it to a different medium or reimagine it in a new context have the discretion and freedom over what they produce. That’s the beauty of inspiration. However, I do also argue that it is necessary for creatives to be intentional about why portions of this story are appealing to them and what they are adapting. Purposefully cutting around central themes to the original almost defeats the purpose of adapting it (unless perhaps the changes help subvert and critically comment on the source material).

The original and adaptation can then be viewed as companion pieces, but that doesn’t mean that critical thinking stops outside the metaphorical door of the source material. Some people will definitely be watching this movie without the lens of the original. Saying the adaptation was bad doesn’t get to the deeper parts of the movie where the choices of creative liberty become under scrutiny as well.

The new work can be judged both alongside and outside the original work. This form of the adaptation, created with intentionality, becomes a way to let the story resonate with another person or different audience. It’s just important to realize which parts are resonating.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) takes advantage of the aesthetics and narrative of the Gothic novel to market a highly romanticized and unconvincing tragic romance between two characters who are shadows of their literary counterparts. Irrelevant to the novel, this movie still leaves much to be desired emotionally and narratively. Much like its dreamy finish, the movie glosses over the themes of obsession, possession, and even the humiliation, pleasure, and pain found in sadomasochism and erratically jumps to a sudden erotic tone. At the end of it all you’re left with an empty and unsettled feeling, which is surprisingly close to how the book leaves you.

This film will no doubt be the introduction of many to Brontë’s story, maybe even inspiring some to pick up the physical book since they loved this movie so much. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Reading is good! But, after you see this movie or any of the many adaptations in theaters this year, expand your analysis to criticize both the adaptation and whether the resulting work is compelling in its own right. (Hadley Blodgett)

If you want to recreate the video accurately, you’ve got to get down to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, which is where you can also find Stonehenge; that’s two bits of history for the price of one. Specifically, an area called Baden’s Clump near the Sidbury Hill area of the chalk plateau was the very spot that Bush floated about like a possessed Cathy, pretending to be up in the wily, windy moors. (Aimee Ferrier)