Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS has sent folks into an absolute frenzy. Some Gen Z-ers have reportedly collapsed in fits of weeping at the “unexpected” (!!) death of its heroine! Hilarious. Others are affronted by all that heaving sex in the barn, on the moors, in the rain….a departure from the only novel written by a 27 year-old reclusive virgin who did not literally describe a sexual encounter in the novel– not even a kiss–no matter what she may have been thinking. Others are so hot and bothered, they’ve seen it multiple times, reveling in its gorgeous costars, corseted and damp from all that fog and snogging. While still others take issue with the movie ignoring half the book and sacrificing larger thematic concerns to an obsession with surface. Trailer Here!

I’m thrilled. Fennell has struck a nerve! Imagine Brontë’s classic provoking almost as much controversy in 2026 as it did when published in 1847. Emily expired a year after its publication– not from bad reviews, but TB. She never learned that her romantic, realistic, gothic/psychological thriller of a tome would come to be regarded as a singular masterpiece by literary giants like Virginia Woolf and Harold Bloom.

The movie sent me back to the book which I re-read during the blizzard. How perfect. What’s driving Heathcliff and Cathy is a wild and all-consuming desire to be completely subsumed in each other, a stormy, passionate union far beyond the physical, echoed by the blustery, “wuthering,” landscape they inhabit at the heights– inside and out– in every moment of their existences, dead or alive.

Not sure exactly what was going on in the Brontë household, but those sisters were simmering cauldrons of imagination and unleashed dark tales of revenge and death, love and madness, and in Emily’s case, acute observations of interior emotional and psychological states, as well as class and generational trauma.

What Fennell has given us is a shortened and compressed narrative based on the book but minus its complex layers of narration, fewer characters carrying the thematic load, and two beautiful Aussies in the lead roles. Jacob Elordi is a towering and dark Heathcliff. While not quite the “dark skinned… gypsy” the book describes, he’s a mysterious outsider, swarthy and brooding enough to suggest the beast who would overwhelm his childhood soulmate, Cathy. On the other hand, blond Margot Robbie falls short of Brontë’s Cathy with “dark curls,” and while ravishing at 35  has more trouble suggesting unbridled youth than her 7 years younger costar.

Home is the desolate Wuthering Heights, a whirlwind of shifting allegiances and simmering class resentments. At the head of the ancient Earnshaw family is an alternately indulgent, cruel, and drunken patriarch played by a scabrous Martin Clunes who adopts and sometimes brutalizes an orphan boy whom Cathy names and seizes on as her soulmate: Heathcliff.  As children, Cathy and Heathcliff are wonderfully played by Charlotte Mellington and the exceptional Owen Cooper who wowed us in the brilliant British crime drama ADOLESCENCE.

Fennell might have widened her development of these characters, but instead narrows her focus and physicalizes the central theme: Heathcliff and Cathy  ARE each other. They share a soul. They hunger for physical consummation in pursuit of an indissolubility which binds them to something larger than either of them separately.  Brontë may take a different route to this end, but Fennell is true to the novel’s themes and the protagonists destructive attempts to “be together” which end up consuming them and the society which bred them.

That Fennell locates Heathcliff and Cathy’s obliterating ardor for each other in the realm of the sexual is a daring choice. Their deadly desire is foreshadowed in the opening sequence which binds sex to death in a ritual of public humiliation and torture. That very first scene is deeply disturbing. It opens with the sounds of someone moaning, then reveals itself as a public hanging where everyone from children to one orgasmic nun takes in the spectacle of death and sex, torture, humiliation– with lewd relish. The child Cathy is in the crowd and laughs as she runs over the moors toward home swinging a doll at the end of a noose. Her companion Nelly Dean (well-played by Hong Chau) is yet another destructive outsider/betrayer– more villainous than in the novel which she partially narrates.

Fennell allows their desire to creep up on them… until they finally succumb. And when they do the filmmaker holds back. There is no nudity. They cling to  fleeting moments. Forces beyond their control close in. Some critics have said there is no heat, no chemistry, not enough sex. There’s plenty, and it’s everywhere. Every inch of every frame reflects the extreme emotional states of these characters and their repressed eroticism within the confines of their claustrophobic world.
It’s visually extravagant: sumptuous and surreal costumes, lacquered blood red floors, gilded walls dripping sweat, Cathy dripping jewels, lying in a boudoir the color of her own skin, encased in a house with hands reaching out from every surface, owned by her conventional husband Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif.) and fussed over by his ward Isabella who’s created a plaything for Cathy in the form of a duplicate doll house in which resides a miniature Cathy with her real hair!  Alison Oliver who plays the deceptively demure and creepy Isabella will soon be a plaything herself– but a complicit one in Heathcliff’s revenge scenario.
This is one of many kinky liberties Fennell has taken– which is becoming her trademark. Remember that funky bathwater scene in her 2023 SALTBURN? Well you’ll never look at cracked raw eggs, kneaded bread dough, or the occasional fish in aspic the same way again. The atmosphere pulses dark and voluptuous with Anthony Willis’s score and haunting synth-pop tracks by Charlie XCX wrapped around these tortured souls, wandering a rough landscape appearing and disappearing in the mist–unable to live or die. It’s a ravishing hell on earth.