Despite much buzz for director Emerald Fennell’s provocative take on “Wuthering Heights,” the filmmaker exited timidly.
The writer-director’s controversial film, currently in theaters, is an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel and stars Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Cathy.
In an interview with Esquire magazine in January, Fennell called the film “sticky and dark” and “a kind of hardcore.”
She made these grand statements — and the trailer got everyone excited with how vulgar it looked — but in the end, she didn’t commit enough to being whimsical and dark.
For the uninitiated, the basic plot is that in 1800s England, Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together in a lonely, secluded house in the English wilderness, develop a toxic relationship that explodes when she marries another man for his money. It ends in tragedy.
Fennell made a name for herself with her previous films, 2020’s Promising Young Woman and 2023’s Saltburn, featuring violence and perverse acts.
It’s no wonder, then, that her version of Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, gained so much hype as a boundary-pushing, sexualized take on the English class staple. But that’s not the real problem.
The following contains spoilers for ‘Wuthering Heights’ (both the novel and the 2026 film) and ‘Saltburn’.
In the novel, after Cathy dies, Heathcliff jumps into her grave. He also digs up her body. He also cut out the sides of her coffin so that their soil and ashes would mix when buried next to her.
In short, Heathcliff is a madman. His behavior after Cathy’s death is unusual, and it is one of the most iconic parts of “Wuthering Heights.” And this is only in the book! Indeed, a stuffy novel from the 1800s couldn’t be more outlandish than a movie released in 2026 by a “provocative” filmmaker.
As it turns out, it’s possible. This movie takes the most famous scene from the book and makes it boring.
For some reason, Fennell decided it was time to button things up tighter, just as she was working on one of the most famous hardcore heartbreak plot lines in all of literature.
In the film, Heathcliff acts like a relatively normal person after Cathy dies. He hugged her body in bed and cried. It’s the kind of scene you often see in calm historical dramas.
After thinking a lot about Fennell’s shock values, what’s most striking about Wuthering Heights is how tame it is.
Deviant behavior is part of Fennell’s brand.
Her film Saltburn is notorious for the scene in which Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) drinks from the bathtub where Felix (Elordi) has ejaculated. There’s also a scene where Oliver simulates sex on Felix’s grave.
The director has previously said that scenes in Saltburn were inspired by Wuthering Heights.
“This comes directly from the Gothic tradition,” she told Buzzfeed in 2023, citing the scene where “Heathcliff digs in the ground to get to Cathy’s coffin.”
He added that Oliver’s intention in knocking on Felix’s grave in Saltburn was, “We’ve let him get what he wants, but he’s still alone. He’s still out there with rocks, not people.”
Fennell makes films in which characters with psychological problems engage in deviant behavior. You could even say that it is a characteristic of her work. “Wuthering Heights” is one of the famous original works that features such antics. It’s puzzling that she decided to water it down.
You can’t use that as an excuse that the critical scenes might have been too similar to “Saltburn” because “Wuthering Heights” was made first and is a more iconic story. It might be worth the risk to compare. And Fennell seems to have no qualms about her other films existing in the shadow of Saltburn, as Elordi and Alison Oliver play siblings in this film and husband and wife in Wuthering Heights.
Fennell told Entertainment Weekly about the ending of ‘Wuthering’: “It’s about the depth of human emotion and how it exists in a deeper sense than just the physical. So, I don’t know, that felt like the right ending for me.”
Much has been said about how she deconstructed the original work. Heathcliff cannot be white. Kathy is supposed to be a teenager (Robbie is 35). This book isn’t even a romance.
In some cases, it is possible to make changes and adapt the book as long as it captures its spirit. But the spirit of “Wuthering Heights” is that they are unhinged people engaged in whimsical Gothic shenanigans. No matter how you think about how the filmmaker handled this adaptation, it’s strange that she cut out the parts of the story that best fit her brand.
