Movie Review: Wuthering Heights (2026)
Let’s establish something right up front: there have been over 35 film and television adaptations of Wuthering Heights since 1920, and Emerald Fennell is only one of two women to have directed one. (The other came out in 2011, for those keeping score at home.) That statistic alone tells you something deeply strange about how cinema has historically approached Emily Brontë’s gothic powder keg of repressed desire and class warfare. Most adaptations cherry-pick only the first section of the novel, fixating on Heathcliff and Cathy’s doomed romance while conveniently ignoring the multi-generational revenge saga that follows. Fennell’s Wuthering Heights follows that same truncated formula, but what she does within those constraints is nothing short of incendiary.
I grew up watching the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon version—one of my mother’s favorite films—so that Hollywood Golden Age interpretation has been my gold standard for decades. William Wyler’s restrained, dignified approach to the material felt definitive, the way certain classics calcify in your imagination. Plus, there was a supernatural element that I loved. There’s no ghostly Cathy on the moors here, yet Fennell’s 2026 version swept me away completely. I loved the style, the surrealism, the sheer brio and passion of it all. These love scenes are more genuinely erotic, despite containing no nudity whatsoever, than anything I’ve witnessed in recent memory. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi generate believable chemistry even though their characters remain only barely sketched out in terms of psychological depth. This is Wuthering Heights as pure sensory experience over narrative substance, and I’m absolutely here for it.
Fennell, who previously directed Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, brings her trademark fascination with sexual danger and power imbalances to the Yorkshire moors. Does everything in the plot add up to logical coherence? Absolutely not. But this is cinema as immersive fever dream, something you simply surrender to rather than intellectually parse.
Talk about melodrama and tortured souls. The film makes explicit what lurks beneath every toxic relationship. Everyone in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has agency, and every catastrophically bad decision gets made with full intentionality. The entire experience is astonishing, gorgeous, and stupefyingly hot. We knew Fennell possessed an unusually sharp eye for sexual danger, but perhaps not quite like this. In every possible way, for every sense, Wuthering Heights becomes pure sensation.
Here’s the plot skinny: Young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) exists in what can only be described as shabby-genteel purgatory, living with her no-account alcoholic father (Martin Clunes, who commits to the role with impressive degeneracy) and her lady’s-maid companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen). Then one day, Mr. Earnshaw drags home a brutalized child (Owen Cooper, plucked from Adolescence and revealing himself to be an absolute revelation) and essentially tells his daughter, "Here’s a human plaything for you, dear." Cathy names the boy Heathcliff after her deceased brother, which is both deeply weird and psychologically telling. The kid accepts this identity theft without protest because he’s already hopelessly, catastrophically in love with her. As the years crawl by, the nature of that love becomes increasingly dangerous, increasingly damaging, and—here’s where Fennell earns her R rating—smoking hot.
Fast forward to adulthood, where Cathy (now Margot Robbie, who performs with feral intensity) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi, weaponizing his bone structure to devastating effect) continue their obsessive dance of mutual destruction. Only Nelly (Hong Chau) understands the toxic dynamics at play. Enter Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), a wealthy merchant who purchases the only nearby estate and moves in with his ward Isabella (Alison Oliver). Cathy needs a husband, preferably one with actual money, and her father’s desperate financial situation makes the choice even more urgent. Edgar takes one look at Cathy and falls into instant, all-consuming lust disguised as love. But what about Heathcliff? He’s a servant, a pet, a person without status or prospects. No respectable woman would dream of marrying someone so socially degraded. Unless, of course, respect has nothing to do with it.
Here’s something our culture wants to deny: some people genuinely possess the capacity to be consumed by desire. Fennell understands this and presents a world where obsession manifests in acts that border on derangement. Isabella constructs dolls from Cathy’s discarded hair like some kind of Gothic stalker-artisan. Edgar decorates an entire room to match Cathy’s exact skin tone, down to replicating the pattern of her freckles across the walls and ceiling.
Fennell assembles a creative team that understands the assignment and then exceeds it spectacularly. Anthony Willis’ score functions like an auditory drug, amplifying every emotional beat until the melodrama becomes genuinely transportive. Charli XCX contributes songs that feel both anachronistic and somehow exactly right, creating a sonic landscape that honors the period while acknowledging our contemporary relationship with these emotions. The musical choices shouldn’t work, but they create this hypnotic effect that pulls you deeper into the film’s fever dream logic.
Suzie Davies’ production design deserves its own separate discussion because it’s doing something genuinely radical here. These are not realistic houses. Nobody actually lived in spaces like this. Edgar’s Thrushcross Grange features sculpted hands emerging from the fireplace and crawling across the ceiling, like something from Dalà and Escher’s joint nightmare. Mr. Earnshaw’s home is rife with mountains of intact green bottles, a sea of glass that visualizes his alcoholism as physical space. Cathy’s childhood kitchen is dominated by an enormous sculptural face that looms over the domestic space like a silent witness to all the psychological damage being inflicted. Davies creates environments that function as externalized emotional states, rooms that mirror the characters’ interior chaos while maintaining just enough grounding in reality to keep us invested.
Jacqueline Durran’s costume work deserves equal recognition for walking an incredibly difficult tightrope. The clothing is historically grounded enough to feel period-appropriate while remaining stylized enough to exist in Fennell’s heightened reality. Watch how Cathy’s wardrobe shifts between the two estates—at Wuthering Heights, everything is raw and tactile, fabrics that suggest both poverty and a certain wild freedom. At Thrushcross Grange, the clothing becomes more refined but also more restrictive, literally tightening around her body as Edgar’s courtship progresses. The hair and makeup work similarly hard to communicate character through visual shorthand. Young Heathcliff’s matted, unwashed appearance slowly transforms into something more groomed as he ages, but Elordi’s adult Heathcliff retains a fundamental wildness that no amount of hair gel can fully contain. Robbie’s Cathy, meanwhile, sports increasingly elaborate hairstyles that feel like armor, each curl and pin suggesting both her desire for control and her fundamental inability to contain her own nature.
Linus Sandgren’s cinematography uses weather itself as a narrative tool. This is a film where wind isn’t just atmospheric detail but an active participant in the drama, whipping clothing and hair into shapes that suggest barely restrained violence. The storm sequences feel genuinely threatening, nature reflecting the characters’ emotional turbulence back at them with merciless accuracy. Sandgren shoots the moors in ways that make the landscape feel both achingly beautiful and subtly hostile, a place where passion can flourish precisely because civilization has such a tenuous hold.
Wuthering Heights demonstrates obsessive attention to physical detail in ways that would make David Cronenberg proud. We get lingering shots of scars on flesh, the methodical tightening of corset laces, tears tracking down faces, fingers exploring skin, egg yolks breaking and oozing across surfaces. This focus on bodies and their fluids, their marks and damages, creates an almost tactile viewing experience.
You don’t just watch this film; you feel it in your nerve endings. Fennell combines this corporeal intensity with her deliberately artificial sets to create something that shouldn’t maintain tonal consistency but somehow never wavers. The whole production is a high-wire act that never once wobbles or falls into unintentional camp. At my screening, people were responding the way audiences do at horror movies, except the thing terrifying them was unfiltered sexuality.
And here’s the critical element that elevates Wuthering Heights beyond mere provocation: consent pervades every frame. Yes, the film gets genuinely filthy, but nothing here is exploitative. Every transgressive act happens because all parties have chosen it. Fennell makes it absolutely clear that these characters possess agency at every moment. They’re not victims of fate or circumstance; they’re the architects of their own catastrophes. Cathy and Heathcliff will have each other regardless of consequences, regardless of damage to their own bodies or hearts, regardless of anyone else who’s destroyed in the process. They know it’s impossible, they know it’s a cosmically terrible idea, and they simply don’t care.
Robbie anchors the whole disaster as someone who’s spent her entire life toying with other people’s emotions because actually expressing her own feelings is unthinkable. She’s impatient, selfish, and cruel, but she comes alive when Heathcliff matches her ferocity beat for beat. It’s the performance of someone recognizing their emotional equal and being simultaneously thrilled and terrified by the recognition. Elordi, meanwhile, plays Heathcliff as someone willing to endure literally any degradation if that’s what loving Cathy requires. He’ll walk straight into hell with a brooding look and grin. Elordi manages to embody both dreamboat longing and genuine menace without those qualities canceling each other out.
But let’s talk about Shazad Latif as Edgar, because he’s doing something remarkable here. Edgar could easily have become a cardboard obstacle, the boring good guy who loses because niceness is inherently unsexy. Instead, Latif creates a fully realized human being who’s kind, thoughtful, passionate in his own way, and completely outmatched. All his affection counts for nothing because Cathy doesn’t want it. Edgar’s growing awareness of how completely he’s been deceived plays out across Latif’s face in waves of disbelief and denial before finally curdling into something darker. He maintains Edgar’s essential decency without making him a pushover, which is a genuinely difficult acting challenge.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights intertwines sexual awakening with outright savagery while maintaining a strain of irreverent humor that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into po-faced solemnity. Through macabre fairytale imagery and performances calibrated with precision, Fennell amplifies the trauma at the story’s core with fierce emotional honesty. This is expressionism applied to romantic literature, a thoroughly modern reworking that captures the novel’s mood through visual excess. Fennell clearly loves Brontë’s source material, even as she takes a blowtorch to conventional adaptation strategies.
My colleague and I walked into Wuthering Heights with high hopes tempered by caution—we walked out shaken, spellbound, and already wanting to see it again. Fennell hasn’t simply reimagined a classic; she’s detonated it and rebuilt it in her own fierce image, redefining what cinematic romance can dare to be. And it demands to be experienced on the biggest screen possible.
