Yet staff at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, have offered a stout defence of the film, calling it “amazing”, “exciting” and “fantastic”.

“I loved it,” said Zoe, who works in housekeeping at the museum. “It made me quite emotional. I thought it was amazing.”

“It really does feel like a fever dream,” said Mia, her colleague from digital engagement. “From the stunning costumes and sets to the dramatic soundtrack, it’s a great escape to the world of Wuthering Heights. The themes of the novel do shine through.”

Ruth, a visitor experience coordinator, agreed that Fennell’s film – which was inspired by her experience reading the novel as a 14-year-old – captures “some essential truths to the book and the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy”.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said, adding it made a refreshing alternative to previous adaptations, which include the 1939 version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, 1992’s take with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film.

Many members of staff expressed the hope it would lead people back to the novel. “I think it will make a lot of viewers intrigued to read the book,” said Sam, from the museum’s programming department.

Others did concede there had been “a lot of changes to the original novel”. “Some may not like [that]”, said Sue, from the learning wing, “but it’s an exciting film to watch in its own right.”

“Is it faithful? No,” said outreach officer Diane. “Is it for purists? No. Is it an entertaining riff on the novel? Yes!” She also endorsed the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, despite Brontë’s novel describing him as “dark-skinned”. The actor was “fantastic”, she said, “and nailed the accent”.

The staff watched the film at a preview screening on Thursday in Keighley organised by studio Warner Bros. “We weren’t involved in the making of the film at all,” said Rebecca Yorke, director of the museum and the Brontë Society.

“But Emerald Fennell was a guest at our Brontë women’s writing festival in September where she spoke eloquently about Wuthering Heights and her personal response to it. Any new interpretation is likely to appeal to one audience more than another and spark lively debate.”

Among those in the audience at the first public screening in Leeds on Friday morning was Brontë’s most recent biographer, Dr Claire O’Callaghan. “I enjoyed it,” she said. “Brilliant performances. There’s a lot of fun built into it, as well as the intensity and tragedy.”

Fennell made it clear the film was her own spin on the story, which was “really refreshing”, said O’Callaghan. “There’s no attempt to have fidelity to the original. If it was more of a period drama then people might get more upset. But this is so far removed from that, and so over the top.”

The Brontë Parsonage Museum is situated in the home in which Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote their groundbreaking novels, which was bought by industrialist Sir James Roberts in 1928 and donated to the Brontë Society. Emily died in the house aged 30 in 1848, the year after she published her first and only book, under the pen name Ellis Bell. [...]

“We are expecting increased visitor numbers and have already a large increase in sales of Wuthering Heights,” said Yorke. “We have extended our opening hours and produced exclusive merchandise in response.” (Catherine Shoard)

I recall first reading Brontë’s novel at school, then again at university, and once more last summer while on holiday with my family (a good poolside read). I’m not sure how many times you have read the book – most adults have consumed it at least twice – but the contours are well-known. We are in Yorkshire, between the wind-battered outpost of Wuthering Heights and the comparatively lush Thrushcross Grange. The Earnshaws live at the former, while the wealthy Lintons move into the latter, setting up a toxic triangulation that will ruin the families for decades to come. Primarily, this story is about the passionate, cruel Catherine Earnshaw and the passionate, cruel adopted son Heathcliff, whose relationship drama is both hot and horrible. It was toxic before we started describing relationships as toxic.

Brontë’s tale – her first and only novel – is not only a love story. It is also about generational trauma (so hot right now!), domestic violence (each chapter is newly gruesome), and yes, race (Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned”, and that has caused an unending discussion over his ethnicity). Like most Gothic novels, it is also ambiguous. You can read whatever you want into Brontë’s writing.

It is fair to say that in Emerald Fennell’s take, which is out in all its quotation-marked glory today, that we get a big-time focus on the love. Margot Robbie brings an impressive degree of yearning to Catherine and Jacob Elordi provides goes all in on brooding for Heathcliff. Fennell, working with production designer Suzie Davies, brings a punchy look to this well-worn story, emphasising class divides and heightening the natural backdrop in a generally doomed manner. Charli XCX’s soundtrack, also out today, is a synthy ode to yearning.

You might be wondering exactly why we needed another adaptation of Wuthering Heights. And the answer is: it’s in the public domain! You can do whatever the hell you want with it! According to IMDB, Brontë’s novel has inspired over 35 film and television adaptations. Does it feel like there have been… more? Maybe. But most adaptations bring new something new to our understanding and appreciation. Like Andrea Arnold’s 2011 interpretation, as raw in many ways to Fennell’s, which cast Black actors to play Heathcliff. Or the 2009 television series, which provided (a little) more breathing room for Brontë’s complications.

Fennell, I suspect, would not want “Wuthering Heights” to become the definitive adaptation. Part of the fun of adaptations is that you get to pick and choose: you like that actor’s performance with this director’s vision in this project’s specific format. The only hard and fast rule is that there’s very little, to borrow another modern term, closure. And that’s why you keep coming back for more. Long Live Wuthering Heights (with or without those quotation marks). (Henry Wong)

In The Times, Dominic Sandbrook writes about Emily Brontë: 'Emily Brontë was a genius — but an odd one'.

For me, the most telling story about Emily concerns her relationship with her dog, Keeper, whom she supposedly adored. One day Keeper climbed on to the bed with muddy paws. Her reaction was to drag him downstairs and punch him repeatedly in the face until he was left “half-blind and stupefied”. No wonder Wuthering Heights is a dog lover’s nightmare. How, for example, does Heathcliff celebrate his elopement with the delicate Isabella Linton? By hanging her dog in front of her, naturally.

Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Emily Brontë lived to a ripe old age, wrote dozens of books and died as one of the most fêted dog lovers in the land. [...]

What to make of this strange, unhappy woman? Modern Brontë enthusiasts are very keen to diagnose her with anorexia or autism but this is surely carrying projection too far. The great biographer and critic Kathryn Hughes calls her “the patron saint of difficult women”. Dog lovers may take a more caustic view.

In any case — and yes, contradicting my earlier assertion that nobody can know what she would have thought — it’s very hard to believe Emily Brontë would have been comfortable with a big-screen version of her only published book. For one thing, she was totally indifferent to what other people thought so it’s difficult to imagine her countenancing the changes film producers demand.

More importantly, for all its brutality, claustrophobia and general brooding, Wuthering Heights is almost entirely lacking in the one thing Hollywood loves above all, which is sex. Given its author’s reclusiveness, that’s surely not surprising. But I find it extraordinary that so many people, including the director Emerald Fennell, consider it a sexy book. Perhaps they really, really hate dogs.

Susan Newby, learning officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England, said, “There is a sense that he is not white Anglo-Saxon, he’s something else, but you don’t know what that is.”

Some scholars believe that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on the Liverpool slave trade. Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff from Liverpool, and Nelly, who narrates this part of the action, explains that Earnshaw saw Heathcliff starving and asked after his “owner.”

It makes sense that Brontë would be interested in slavery. Her father, Patrick Brontë, was associated with the abolitionist politician William Wilberforce, who, according to the Parsonage Museum, helped pay for Patrick to study at Cambridge.

Reginald Watson, an associate professor of literature at East Carolina University, has studied questions of Blackness in the works of the Brontës, including Emily’s sister Charlotte, the “Jane Eyre” author. “My belief is that because of the father’s involvement in abolitionism that both of the authors included connections to slavery in some form,” Watson said. His position is that while Heathcliff “may not be totally Black,” he is mixed.

Another theory, however, is that Brontë was using Heathcliff to comment on prejudices against the Irish, since her father was from Ireland and she was writing at the start of the potato famine there. “Think about Heathcliff who was brought from Liverpool and speaks a sort of gibberish,” said Elsie Michie, a professor of English at Louisiana State University. “The description of Heathcliff conforms almost exactly to the caricatures of the Irish.”

Michie added that the “dynamics of this novel are about otherness in various ways, and that otherness is in Heathcliff.”

Onscreen, however, Heathcliff has largely been played by white actors, including Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and, perhaps most famously, Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 version opposite Merle Oberon as Catherine. (Oberon actually was South Asian but hid that to ascend in Hollywood at the time.) A notable exception is Andrea Arnold’s 2012 adaptation, in which the adult Heathcliff was played by the Black actor James Howson. In an interview with NPR at the time, Arnold said, “In the book it was clear he wasn’t white-skinned. I felt that Emily was not committing exactly; she was playing with her own difference as a female.”

Fennell’s version does away with references to Heathcliff’s race, instead largely focusing on his tortured romance with Cathy (Margot Robbie). Still, the cast doesn’t lack diversity entirely. Nelly is played by the Vietnamese American actress Hong Chau, and Shazad Latif, who is of Pakistani descent, plays Edgar Linton. [...]

But while Newby, for instance, said she believes that Brontë presents Heathcliff as nonwhite, she also thinks the author leaves room for discussion. “She deliberately keeps it ambiguous,” Newby said.

At the same time, Newby isn’t bothered by Elordi’s casting, in part because Fennell has been so explicit about the film being from her own perspective. The director makes a number of major changes, getting rid of some characters and altering details of Cathy and Heathcliff’s interactions. “Somehow I feel more bothered by some past adaptations that have very unquestionably, unthinkingly showed him as being white without ever really reading the book and thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s described,’” Newby said. “It was almost that was a default. You won’t be taken seriously as a lead if he’s not white.”

The mystery is also part of the appeal of Heathcliff: We never do learn his origins before Earnshaw brings him into that household. (Esther Zuckerman)

The short answer to the question, “Is Heathcliff Jewish?” is an emphatic “No,” though that hasn’t stopped Emily Brontë scholars from suggesting that he is in fact Jewish, or at least that he has “Jewish roots.” That’s what Professor Sharon Lynne Joffe argues in a recent issue of Brontë Studies, the Journal of the Brontë Society, which was founded in 1893 and still going strong. Joffe writes that Brontë “incorporated nineteenth-century stereotypes of Jews into her character,” and that she “would have been familiar with these stereotypes through her reading of Blackwood’s Magazine.”

Not so fast, professor. Joffe takes a leap of faith–not a logical step–and adds that “Heathcliff’s physical characteristics, his initial inability to speak English, his lineage, and his eventual success support my contention that Brontë used Jewish stereotypes to create Heathcliff.” Nothing in the novel itself supports the notion that he’s Jewish, though like Jewish characters in fiction and Old Testament figures like Jonah, he’s the Outsider. Of course, Jews aren’t the only literary outsiders.

Nor does it help Professor Joffe’s case to summon Blackwoods to support her claims. My own reading of that magazine and others from the Victorian era, including Punch and Cornhill (I was conducting research for my book about British literature and the British Empire) taught me that editors, publishers and writers used racial stereotypes to describe anyone and nearly everyone on the planet, including the “wild” Irish. The word “wog, and the letters WOG, which stood for “Worthy Oriental Gentleman,” were used to describe the French, the Italians, the Indians from India and anyone with brown or black skin who didn’t speak proper English. Racism and anti-Semitism lurked at the heart of an empire where the sun supposedly never set.

In the page of the novel, Heathcliff is called all kinds of names:  “gipsy” (Roma in today’s lingo), “Afreet” (a dangerous figure in Islamic cultures) and a “Lascar” (a East Indian sailor who worked on English ships). But he’s never called a Jew, Jewish or Semitic. In chapter four, readers learn that Mr. Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, encounters “in the streets of Liverpool…a dirty, ragged black-haired child” who speaks “gibberish that nobody could understand.” Gender and ethnicity unknown. The child is initially referred to as an “it,” and neither masculine nor feminine. (Jonah Raskin)

When Sam Hirst teaches Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, they often find the students who end up hating it are the ones who go in expecting it to be a love story.

“They come in thinking it’s a romance,” says Hirst, who lectures in English literature at the University of Liverpool and teaches courses at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. “And then they’re like, ‘This isn’t a romance, this is domestic abuse. This is a nightmare.’”

Victorian critics agreed. Early reviews of Wuthering Heights found it disturbing and violent. In fact, the first known movie adaptation—a (now lost) 1920 silent film—advertised itself as “Emily Brontë’s tremendous Story of Hate.” So why do so many modern readers expect it to be a romance?

“You really see a change in the way in which Wuthering Heights is understood with the release of the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon,” Hirst says. This film adaptation cut out the second half of the book, downplayed the violence committed by Olivier’s character, Heathcliff, and played up the romance between Heathcliff and Oberon’s character, Cathy.

Since then, there have been several feature film adaptations of Wuthering Heights, including the 1954 Mexican film Abismos de Pasión, the 1966 Bollywood musical Dil Diya Dard Liya, the 1970 British adaptation starring Timothy Dalton, the 1985 French film Hurlevent, and the 2011 movie by Andrea Arnold. Like the 1939 film, all five of these movies adapt the first part of the novel by focusing on Cathy and Heathcliff’s romantic (if destructive) feelings for each other, while excluding the second half of the novel in which Heathcliff exhibits some of his worst behavior. [...]

For the reader, Heathcliff’s horrific actions raise questions about the nature of his supposed love for the deceased Cathy.

“I mean, he abducts the daughter of the woman he’s said to love, and forces her to marry somebody,” says Claire O’Callaghan, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University and author of Emily Brontë Reappraised. “His bad behavior is not only because she chose somebody else, but because of the things he chooses to do as well.”

The highly acclaimed 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights doesn’t include any of Heathcliff’s actions toward the children, because it doesn’t include the children at all. Instead, it ends by fast-forwarding from Cathy’s death to Heathcliff’s death many years later, and then showing the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff happily walking together on the West Yorkshire moors. The 1954, 1970, and 2011 adaptations only include Hareton (“Jorge,” in the Mexican version) as a young child, and don’t portray Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.

Eliminating the second generation of characters and Heathcliff’s treatment of them “allows you to ignore that who he is persecuting are the innocent,” Hirst says. “You can’t think of it as a love story if you actually honestly portray that part of the story,” because “what his love actually looks like is this horrifying toxic nightmare of a thing.”

Early media coverage of Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation has noted the film’s deviations from the novel, including Cathy’s age (Robbie is 35 whereas in the novel her character dies before 20); the casting of Elordi as Heathcliff, whose racial and ethnic identity in the book is ambiguous (characters frequently describe him using a slur for Romani people); and the film’s ahistorical costumes and sets.

Additionally, the new movie does not tell the second-generation characters’ stories following Cathy’s death and, in fact, overwrites some of their existence. In Fennell’s version, Cathy’s brother is dead by the time her father brings home a selectively mute boy, whom Cathy chooses to name Heathcliff after her deceased brother. The new film also doesn’t include Heathcliff or Cathy’s children.

All of which makes sense. It’s hard to spin a film as a Valentine’s Day movie if the romantic hero kidnaps the heroine’s daughter. (Becky Little)

Both of these characters are messy. They're destructive. They're unapologetic. They put female desire first, which I think is going to piss some people off, but I loved that about them. It would be easy to say that their entire identities are wrapped up in romantic obsession. But talk about how important it was to show that female desire, that all consuming desire, and the choices that these women make for themselves? 

Margot Robbie: Do you know what felt radical? We have a scene — Alison and I — on the swing in the garden, and it's a scene essentially, where we're just fight over Heathcliff, and it felt so radical to do a scene like that. The ironic thing is that we've fought so hard to not have to do that in movies anymore, but now it's been so long since — I don't know if I've done a scene like this since I was on the soap opera I was on back in Australia when I was a teenager. It felt so radical to just be two women fighting over a man. It was crazy. “You have him. He's so handsome. Who you talking about? You could never take him!” It was weirdly exciting to do.

Alison Oliver: Yeah, it was strange. All of these characters do have — I feel like Emerald really gave them agency in their own ways as well, which within the sort of confines or the period, you do feel like they have agency in some sense. And I think that was important to show. 

Absolutely. They have depth and agency.

MR: Yeah, they all make the choices. And then everything you see in the movie happens because of the choices they make. Whereas usually, even now, when we're not doing scenes fighting about men, most of the time, you're usually playing a character that something happens to, and then you watch a movie about the effects of that thing happening to that female character. 

AO: They are the decider.

MR: For both of our characters, I feel like we make a choice, we do a thing, and it's not the right thing in most instances, and then we have to deal with the consequences.

OK, Margot, this does not work unless you and Jacob have the most insane chemistry we've ever seen on screen. And you did. I'm always fighting to bring back chemistry, and you guys did it. 

MR: Yes! Chemistry and charisma are two things that I'm like, why can't we have that? That's what I want in the movies. Charismatic characters or I want insane chemistry,

Was there a moment where you and Jacob were like, Oh, we got it?

MR: There were a couple of moments. Even on day one. [We shot] the first scene in the movie where Cathy flings open the bed hangings, and [Heathcliff is] lying in bed. And then we ended up cutting this bit but I walked up over him, and then crouch down and got like this close to his face and told him to, “get up, we've got neighbors,” or whatever it was. And we cut that bit because the proximity is something we wanted to save. But, I mean, that was day one, and even then, everyone was kind of like, “Whoa.” And we were like, “Okay, I think this movie's gonna work.” Also just because she's throwing something at him, and he's throwing it back, and he's like, “What?” There was already an intensity between them that I think we could build on from that point. (Kathleen Newman-Bremang)

   

The Wuthering Heights album is not a “soundtrack”. Charli did not arrange the chamber orchestra that underpins the action on Fennell’s screen, punctuating the moor scenes with bow stabs as sharp as granite, and orchestral drones as relentless as the water cannon that rains down on Heathcliff’s head. The composer Anthony Willis and arranger Gareth Murphy are responsible for that signature sound. Her voice only appears a few times in the actual film. First, on the creepy first single “House”, which features a poem from the Velvet Underground’s John Cale (“can I speak to you privately for a moment!”) over insane levels of industrial feedback. Then, she is heard again in the two-minute “Wall of Sound” (“unbelievable tension!”), where she delivers an emotive tune over a crescendo that turns, eventually, into a George Martin-style string nervous breakdown. “Chains of Love” is the best thing about Wuthering Heights – and I don’t mean the album, I mean the whole project: a banger with the ghost of N-Trance, and much more emotion than Margot Robbie can register in her face. The film employs the kind of punky anachronisms that were fun and sexy 20 years ago in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. But the musical anachronisms – Charli’s commitment to her own distorted club world, among the rocks and the heather – seem like art somehow.

There were no review copies of the album available, even though the film has had plenty of press screenings, and I wondered if Charli’s people were already trying to keep the projects separate. So what of the new songs, only released today (13 February)? “Always Everywhere” is clear and beautiful: she is good at the kind of tender tunes you get from Scandinavian popstars like Robyn, tunes that are sad and human: “I feel like home / still you pull away”. Fennell said that with her film, she was trying to recapture the emotions she felt reading Wuthering Heights for the first time as a fourteen year-old. But there is no tenderness on screen. It is as though XCX and Fennell agreed on the approach for their project, went away, and came back with totally different results. 

“Seeing Things” takes the action off the moors and into a modern city, exploring the limerence phenomenon of seeing an ex on the street wherever you look, because they still have residence in your mind. The science of infatuation is broadly understood now, all over the internet – as are the impulses behind sado-masochism. XCX captures the latter on “Out Of Myself”, where she talks about gripping the floorboards, pushing her cheeks into stone, over a classy avant-garde string section. The words evoke some of Fennell’s sex scenes, but offer something more interior, more quiet, than the bang-bang BDSM in the film. 

Wuthering Heights, the album, feels like another step towards sincerity for XCX, albeit through the lens of someone else’s love story – and sincerity is something she struggles with, because it was not part of her original pop creation. The most haunting music in Fennell’s film is a late eighteenth-century folk song, “the Dark Eyed Sailor”, about lovers tortured by years of separation: it is a rare moment of cultural harmony. I don’t know, is it too much to ask that Charli could have sung it? What does it say that she didn’t? It is performed by Olivia Chaney, a folk singer – and don’t go streaming the album to hear it because it’s not on there!

When XCX announced her collaboration with John Cale last year, she used his description of the Velvet Underground’s music – “elegant and brutal” – to describe her planned approach. Those words could now be criticisms of Fennell’s film. Although it is one of the more psychological adaptations – about childhood abuse leading to co-dependency – it wastes its observations, and uses violence as an attempt to titillate. It is a cosplay performance of trauma, corny as Fifty Shades. But the album has emotional complexity, and most importantly it has a heart. Stream it today, and don’t see the film. (Kate Mossman)

That’s quite the opening statement and if what follows is more conventionally Charli, it’s still satisfyingly punchy. Dying for You has the staccato urgency of the Killers’ Mr Brightside and lyrics (“I’m losing gallons of blood/ the river’s turning to red/ I got a smile on my face”) that could have been written by Fennell, while the spectral ballad Altars turns Harry Nilsson’s One (“one is the loneliest number”) on its head by proclaiming “one is not the loneliest number”. More world-class wallowing, which is kind of the point of Wuthering Heights.

Like the film, the album tails off a bit towards the end before rousing itself. Eyes of the World, a duet with the American pop star Sky Ferreira, is overblown and underwhelming, but Funny Mouth provides an appropriately tragic electro-goth finale. Written with Finn Keane, who co-produced the album, and Joe Keery, the singer-actor who played Steve in Stranger Things, it combines rainswept strings, stuttering electronics and Twin Peaks synths with some gorgeously defiant vocals from Aitchison. “Are you man enough to compromise?” she sings. A challenge to the obstinate Heathcliff? One thing’s for sure, Aitchison, like Fennell, is compromising for nobody. (Ed Potton)

Charli scored a coup by coaxing former Velvet, John Cale, to appear on the tremendous single “House”. Like Nellie Dean, the elderly housekeeper who unreliably narrates most of Emily Brontë’s novel, the 82-year-old Cale’s weathered vocal adds a sense of deeper time (Brontë was always reaching back – her mid-19th century novel was set in the late 18th century), along with a reminder that passion and creativity doesn’t necessarily fade with age. Over the ragged, repeated snag of a violin bow, Cale speaks with haunting formality: “Can I speak to you privately for a moment?/ I just want to explain/ Explain the circumstances I find myself in/ What and who I really am/ I’m a prisoner, to live for eternity…” Towards the close, Charli balances his measured tone with a long, corrosive howl.

That howl echoes through the album, even as Charli switches to a low, guttural mutter on songs such as “Wall of Sound”. Here, she invokes “unbelievable tension... unbelievable pressure” that builds over loops of thwarted yearning; it escalates to a clubbable pace on “Dying for You” with its breathless revelations, “All the pain and torture that I went through all makes sense to me now/ I was dying for you.” The wild beauty of the misty moors gleams through “Always Everywhere” with a melody that scales the hills, while “Seeing Things” deals in madness and visions over punchy, sawing violins. The spectacular “Chains of Love” writhes around in the anguish of obsessive love: “I’d rather lay down in thorns/ I’d rather drown in a stream/ I’d rather light myself on fire/ I’d rather wear all these scars/ I’d rather watch my skin bleed…”

The whole thing is a phantasmagorical fever dream that relishes its weird and experimental noises without sacrificing cool hooks or accessible language. Charli proves herself much more in tune with the terrible complexity of Brontë’s original vision than Fennell: there are no inverted commas around the emotion expressed on this record. A windswept, gothic triumph. (Helen Brown)

A mood board rather than a conventional album, the record morphs into a jagged power ballad on Wall of Sound, where Charli’s vocals crack with emotion against a stark swirl of strings. Art pop gives way to disco abandon on the pounding Dying for You, which begins as a pastiche of the Buggles hit Video Killed the Radio Star and then swerves into a fearless foray into weepy hauteur on the dance floor.

That Charli doesn’t quite know how to respond to the fame she long sought and finally achieved with Brat is underscored by the mockumentary film she is releasing in parallel with Wuthering Heights. Charli is a good actress – she more than acquitted herself hosting Saturday Night Live in 2024 – but the consensus is that, with The Moment, she seems unsure whether to skewer the absurdities of the music business or play along with them.

She’s a half-in-half-out star, aware of the ridiculousness of the dog-and-pony show yet keen on a big shiny ribbon nonetheless. [...]

Reviews of Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights have been mixed, but it’s hard to imagine Charli XCX’s accompanying soundtrack having the same Marmite effect. It ends with the brilliant one-two of My Reminder, a bare-bones banger that has Charli emoting against an electro-clash bass, and Funny Mouth, a perfect dreamlike sigh-off, with lashings of strings and Charli seemingly singing from the bottom of a bog.

It’s fantastically weird album, much better than Brat and almost enough to wash away memories of her moribund mooch at Malahide. (Ed Power)

The album is, once again, neither one thing nor another. It began life as the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, but has grown into something else, a companion to the film: a proper album so to speak, the follow-up to Brat. It arrives as part of a sideways move into cinema. Charli has no fewer than seven films on the go, a risky act of saturation, including the Brat mockumentary The Moment, released next week.

Charli’s Wuthering Heights is being released on the same day that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” opens. The quotation marks in the film’s title denote the director’s take on the literary classic, a deliberately schlocky erotic melodrama that, judging from its mixed reviews, takes enjoyment in boiling Heathcliff’s character down to exactly seven words from the novel: “he has an erect and handsome figure”.

Wuthering Heights the album takes a different approach. Listening to it without having seen the film, or only its trailer, our minds aren’t immediately filled by images of Margot Robbie’s Cathy watching dough being kneaded suggestively or Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff licking fleshy wallpaper. That gives us space to appreciate Charli’s more sophisticated take on Brontë’s gothic tale of family dysfunction, sexual taboo and doomed romance. But the album struggles to stand on its own feet. (...)

The songs have been made with Finn Keane, a regular collaborator dating back to her PC Music days. They effectively transport her distinctive musical character into an orchestral cinematic soundscape. But after Charli’s run of acutely conceived albums, this fairly brief one, lasting just 34 minutes, stands out as the least convincing or fully developed. Wuthering Heights is a middling thing, neither fish nor fowl. (Ludovic Hunter-Tilney)

   

Good reviews:

Fennell knows how to compose a shot, make her actors looks exactly as desirable or deplorable as she requires, and make the landscape surrounding her performers appear vast, foreboding, even threatening. The costumes in Wuthering Heights are award worthy, and I had no real issues with the performances. My greatest hesitation about the movie is the nasty tone that asks us to empathize with terrible human beings. I certainly don’t have issues with having unlikable characters at the center of certain films, but the filmmaker still has to invite me into this place where they want me to spend more than two hours. The emotional volatility is a great deal of clanging and rattling with nothing to show for it in the end. I wanted any type of connection from a movie that seemed more interested in pushing us away. (Steve Prokopy)

Fans of Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights should be aware that this isn’t a faithful retelling. Visually, tonally, and narratively, this adaptation plays by its own set of rules — it ditches key characters and intergenerational subplots. Fennell’s take on the material focuses squarely on the complicated relationship between the film’s two leads, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). [...]

Three movies into her filmography, and Fennell has established an unmistakable cinematic voice. In terms of aesthetic and tone, “Wuthering Heights” feels closer to Saltburn than Promising Young Woman. It’s racy and joyfully seductive with a winking trashiness. The film opens with people gawking at a corpse’s erect “junk,” and it only amps the WTF-factor from there. I could go on and on about floors made to resemble spilled blood and bedroom walls designed to mimic human skin (with veins and freckles).

Beyond the dreamlogic visuals, “Wuthering Heights” also carries Fennell’s thematic sensibilities too. It’s a story about money, status, and people navigating the politics of class structures. There’s a particular emphasis on gender roles, and the struggle of women to claim their self-agency in a world of domineering (and often daft) men.

Fennell packs plenty to chew on into every scene. But you can also sit back, turn off your analytical brain and just soak up the sumptuous costumes and production design while Anthony Willis’s catchy score washes over you. [...]

Audiences will no doubt watch this film and melt over the steamy sex scenes, and by all means, do your thing. But “Wuthering Heights” also reads as a cautionary tale, celebrating the miracle of love by exposing how fragile and fleeting it truly is. Some romances aren’t doomed by fate; they are murdered by pride. (Victor Stiff)

Director Emerald Fennell guts one of the most emotionally violent novels ever written for a surface-level flirtation with corset kink that's as vapid as it is bafflingly tame.

Nearly 180 years after its publication, Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel “Wuthering Heights” gets a revamp from Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn), whose film has been extensively marketed as a fresh, heavily stylised and sexually charged version of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s tumultuous relationship.

With inverted commas to boot.

It starts off promisingly enough, with a hanged man with a visible erection, while a young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) looks on. This could have been an early indicator that Fennell is keen to explore the Eros / Thanatos of it all - how life and death instincts are intertwined and can lead to self-destructive behaviours, especially when it comes to matters of the heart and sexual yearnings. But why bother with such trivial things when you can settle for an increasingly jarring tone that sits somewhere between comically surreal and serious?

We then see how Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes) brings home a street urchin (Owen Cooper), whom she quickly claims as her “pet”. [...]

There’s every reason to celebrate a filmmaker doing something different with a source material that has been adapted countless times on both small and big screens.

Sure, streamlining the narrative, ditching half the characters and whitewashing your main character are questionable choices – and ones made before, especially when you look at the roster of actors who have been cast as Heathcliff in the past. But those quotations marks in the title should warn audiences from the get-go: this is Fennell’s version and she can do what she pleases, no matter how anti-academic it is. The filmmaker has openly said that she wanted to make a movie that captured how Brontë’s novel made her feel the first time she read it, aged 14. More power to her and literary purists be damned.

However, if you’re going to ditch the race component, strip away the class commentary and not bother with themes of intergenerational trauma inherent to the text, all in favour of selling your film as bold, sexy and provocative, your version better swing for the fences when it comes to that trifecta. Depressingly, “Wuthering Heights” is so astonishingly dull and tame that you’ll wonder what all the giddy hype was about.

Fennell can’t crank up the thirstiness, campery and strangeness - only paid lip service through some bold decor choices – and doesn’t bring any genuine frisson to simmering sexual awakenings or lustful repression.

She settles for having two genetically blessed actors – Margot Robbie doing her best Hermione Granger impression and Jacob Elordi as smoldering scaffolding – instantly paired together and have them getting caught in the rain. A LOT. Beyond that, there’s no palpable sense of longing and anticipation that could make a room suddenly feel suffocating, and Fennell ends up reducing the torrid attraction to some runny egg textures, repeated finger sucking and a carriage quickie. Had we gotten more of Cathy’s lustful stirrings triggered by her peeping on a mild BDSM encounter, the pent-up lust and the thrill of yearning would have seemed less like a transparent bid to promote a BookTok fan fiction that’s not a million miles away from E.L. James.

In their defense, both Robbie and Elordi do manage to conjure some chemistry - but no tension, chiefly because their characters are in close proximity from the get-go and you don’t relate to them in any way. These are two people for whom you should feel something for – both sympathy and hatred for the way their complex and conflicting desires stem from deep-seated trauma and self-perpetuating cycles of abuse.

Granted, Martin Clunes’s paternal figure is clearly meant to act as both the inebriated gambler and Heathcliff’s abuser, who in the novel was Cathy’s brother Hindley (absent here); but he comes off as a hapless drunk more than a figure which inspires fear and resentment. It doesn’t feel like enough to feed Heathcliff’s thirst for revenge and by extension his cruel nature, nor enough to justify this snobbishly bratty version of Cathy.

When you remove the very backstories that make the doomed lovers such fascinatingly contradictory protagonists in the first place, what you’re left with are two shallow smokeshows whose tiresome push and pull will make you wish you were watching Cruel Intentions instead.

Now there was a raunchy adaptation that actually took some risks, with a director that understood the source material.

As it is, “Wuthering Heights” is less “I hated you, I loved you, too” and more “Um ah, I don’t know, maybe, just look at me in a blood-red PVC dress that would make Baz Luhrman’s shorts tighten”.

Speaking of which, kudos to Jacqueline Durran and Suzie Davies, whose maximalist costumes and audaious production design are the film's main redemptive qualities. Fennell wanted striking stylistic choices, and they understood the assignment. It’s hardly their fault that the director couldn’t tease any substance from their heightened aesthetic and only wanted a Charli XCX-scored social media showreel.

Another redeeming shout-out must go to Alison Oliver, who stands out as Edgar’s ward, the prudish Isabella Linton. But once again, Fennell bundles it. As terrific as Oliver is as comic relief, the director makes the giant jump from having her character go from blushing ingenue to willing sub in a matter of minutes. While the dynamic between Heathcliff and Isabella could have been provocative and unsettling, it ends up played – like so many promising moments - as hollow parody. [...]

It didn’t have to be subtle, nor faithful to its literary source; but when the end result guts one of the most emotionally violent novels ever written for a surface-level flirtation with corset kink which has all the weight and depth of a half-arsed lingerie advert, there’s every reason to bemoan a lack of subversiveness, sensuality and heart.

As it is, purists are much better off seeking out Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version and teens hankering for a dose of destructive codependence courtesy of two sexually charged messy bitches should rush to discover Cruel Intentions. The soundtrack’s better in that one too. (David Mouriquand)

Part of the issue is physicality. Heathcliff is often imagined as dark, brooding, almost elemental – a man forged by humiliation and rage. Elordi brings brooding, yes, but not the volcanic menace the role demands. Robbie’s Catherine, meanwhile, carries elegance and self-awareness where wild contradiction should reign.

Narratively, the film often feels like a reworking of Romeo and Juliet – but transplanted onto the moors of Wuthering Heights.

There is the class divide between Catherine and Heathcliff. There is the meddling voice of practicality. Nelly, much like Juliet’s nurse, becomes the advocate of safety and social survival. She nudges Catherine toward the wealthy Edgar, only, she has more selfish reasons to do this.

Indeed, this emphasis on social structure over psychological obsession shifts the centre of gravity. Brontë’s novel is less about star-crossed lovers and more about destructive possession. Fennell’s version leans into the romance – and occasionally softens the brutality that makes the original so unsettling. [...]

After Catherine’s wedding to Edgar, the film’s tone shifts to brighter colours, imbuing the audience with a giddy summer fever, complete with songs by British pop singer Charli XCX. Yes, this is a reimagining but would Brontë approve or would she be rolling in her grave? Probably the latter.

Still, there are moments when the film soars. Certain frames are breathtaking – Catherine standing against a bruised sky, Heathcliff emerging from shadow like a spectre of unfinished grief. In these instances, Fennell captures the aching, ghostly quality that has kept “Wuthering Heights” alive for generations.

So, was this reimagining necessary? Perhaps not. Does it work? In parts.

It is a film of striking images and bold intentions, hampered by uneven casting, sluggish pacing, and a weaker story than the original masterpiece. “Wuthering Heights” does not fully unleash the savage heart of Brontë’s story – but it offers, albeit fleetingly, glimpses of the original. (Dinesh Kumar Maganathan)

Yes, the first act is a provocative setup intended to create cognitive dissonance. The young orphan continues to take beatings for Catherine, even when he had nothing to do with them. Years later, Catherine (Margot Robbie) is married, but has an affair with Heathcliff (Frankenstein’s Jacob Elorbi) when he returns years later. Here, it is interesting to see Catherine treated like a doll, a piece of property, but you can easily see how Heathcliff was treated as a “pet” and as property of the Earnshaw estate. 

When the film shifts into adulthood, the emotional wounds feel generational, like rocks forming on the bed of a rushing river. This is used to intensify the romance, a toxic passion that frames trauma as an aesthetic. Still, you cannot deny the exceptional chemistry between Robbie and Elorbi, in the way that two beautiful, horny people have when they hardly have the choice of free will in their own lives. 

However, without that emotional connection that forms the bond, there is no reason to believe there is a deeper connection beyond the physical. That is an insult to Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic work. This Wuthering Heights withers under a leering eye instead of a symbiotic one, forgetting the genuine intimacy underneath all the feral intensity. (M.N. Miller)

It's meant to be a pointed reference — a nod by Fennell to the fact that this is not a normal adaptation. Instead, it's a re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn director had reading the book as a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old. The result is a dreamlike, visually stunning — if emotionally stunted — re-interpretation of the doomed love between brooding, hunky orphan Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and the beautiful, mercurial estate master's daughter, Catherine (Margot Robbie). 

Which would be an impressive swing if the changes to the source material were written with any intention of reinventing the story for modern day, instead of — at best — misreading what the book was trying to say, or, at worst, turning Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" into something that isn't Wuthering Heights at all. 

Sadly, it often feels like the latter. Like in many of Fennell's other works (anyone heard of her Bad Cinderella Broadway adaptation?) she seems less interested in translating Brontë's story than in performing hollow provocation with it. For example, the rumour is also true that the movie begins the way you've heard: A nameless man has been hanged in a town square, as children point and laugh at a certain … visibly swollen appendage, and a group of onlookers excitedly gyrate below him. 

Fans of the actual Wuthering Heights are free to scratch their heads at this point, given that nothing even approximating this scene crops up in the book's opening pages. Though if scratching is your default response to baffling left-field narrative turns, you may want to make sure your nails are trimmed. If not, watching Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" will likely lead to a brain injury. [...]

He goes from a sociopathic monster who dreams about murdering infants and painting houses with blood into a swoon-inducing object of desire. Fennell turns him into an infinitely immature depiction of an "I can fix him" hero who towers over ahistorical costumes and set design more reminiscent of Tim Burton than Britain.

From that, she turns a Romantic era-influenced story, itself in no way a romance, into something closer to Pride and Prejudice meets Fifty Shades of Grey. As a filmic oddity, it does make for an interesting invention. But stylized to the point of camp, it doesn't make a good movie. (Jackson Weaver)

For a film that was marketed as being sexually provocative and freaky, Wuthering Heights barely has any memorable scenes that establish Catherine and Heathcliff’s sexual chemistry. The scene in which Catherine fantasises about Heathcliff, cross-cut with dough being aggressively slapped against a kitchen counter, is straight out of a TikTok thirst trap.

Her visions of his bare, scarred back aim for tortured sensuality but land as hollow aesthetic posturing. Even so, Catherine acts so coy and disinterested around Heathcliff that you wish she would—at least once—own her desire without disguising it as indifference.

In all fairness, the film does some things right. The motif of self-harm is surprisingly resonant. Catherine slaps herself in the mirror and, at one point, compels Nelly to cinch her corset unbearably tight—a deliberate act of self-inflicted punishment.

The final act of the film—the part where Catherine breathes her last and loses her baby—is emotionally affecting even if its intensity is undermined by the film’s earlier tonal flippancy.

I wouldn’t want to dignify the absolutely bizarre arc where Heathcliff torments his wife Isabella (Alison Oliver) with an analysis. It is truly one of the most absurd things I have seen on-screen—one which doesn’t serve any larger purpose nor does it add stylistically to the narrative.

In film studies, adaptation theory argues that a film can either closely transfer most details of the source text or the original source can serve as loose inspiration.

Fennell’s film somehow attempts all of it and yet achieves none of it. It doesn’t complicate the themes and anxieties of the source text but instead diminishes them to the point that the film barely functions as an adaptation.

Despite its fleeting moments of competence, Wuthering Heights is laughably bad. It is Wattpad fanfiction that should have never left the website’s confines, much less made into a full-length feature film.

The soundtrack, drawn from Charli XCX’s new album of the film's name, does little to deepen or meaningfully complicate the narrative’s tonal register.  As a die-hard Charli XCX stan who practically evangelises ‘Brat’, even I find it hard to defend the popstar here.

If the many adaptations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights formed a highway, Fennell’s film would be less a pit-stop, more a jarring pothole—one that threatens to derail the entire journey toward a definitive adaptation.

In trying to modernise a classic, the film forgets the one thing that made it endure: emotional truth. (Deepansh Duggal)

Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" then positions itself as a power play of sorts, with Cathy and Heathcliff trying to make each other realize what they are missing out on. Through Fennell's lens, the movie becomes "Fifty Shades of Grey" with a dash of Brontë, which on paper sounds fun and sexy, but as a movie it plays rather stagnantly. As a viewer it's easy to get caught up in the windswept hills and the beautifully photographed rainstorms, or entranced by Jacqueline Durran's costumes; it's just a shame the movie is a bore.

Elordi (currently Oscar-nominated for "Frankenstein") and Robbie are two attractive movie stars, but "Wuthering Heights" should be carried by their passion, and there isn't a spark to sustain its 140-minute runtime. Their performances play like exaggerated types, with a heavy emphasis on Heathcliff's brooding persona. It all falls flat underneath the pretty surface.

There is a lot of curiosity and skepticism surrounding "Wuthering Heights," which alone will drive box office sales over its opening weekend. Whether audiences arrive at the movies with deep knowledge of Brontë's work, or having flipped through the Sparks Notes just to be able to write that paper in high school, "Wuthering Heights" will spark some discussion. It may elicit a few yawns as well. (Matthew Passantino)

Fennell’s misinterpretation of Brontë’s mythic love story also betrays Kate Bush’s traditionalist, non-feminist genius and deliberately assaults the novel’s status, implying, as in Saltburn, a critique of the British Empire’s toxic, colonialist dysfunction. It’s an apt tribute to Millennial decadence. (Armond White)

Boyero tampoco compra la pareja protagonista. "Aquí no hay química entre ellos", asegura sobre Margot Robbie y Jacob Elordi. Aunque reconoce el esfuerzo interpretativo y el despliegue visual, siente que la emoción está subrayada de forma excesiva. "Detesto la billetera constante de pianos y violines. Si quieren transmitir emoción, pueden hacerlo de otras formas".

El resultado, dice, es paradójico: una historia pensada para sacudir al espectador que le deja completamente frío. "Con una historia tan volcánica, a mí no se me ha alterado nada el corazón". Ni siquiera el desgarro de Catherine logra convencerle: "Aunque haya mucho desgarro, pienso que no deben quererse tanto. No me ha conmovido". (Sara M. Santelli) (Translation)