Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights uses beautiful cinematography, to masterfully mirror the landscape of the English moors. However, that is the biggest similarity between Fennell’s film and Emily Brontë’s acclaimed novel. While the cinematography evokes the novel’s atmosphere, the emotional and thematic substance that defines Wuthering Heights is almost entirely stripped away.
The film follows Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and her adopted brother Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) who was brought home by her abusive father. Yet from the outset, the adaptation begins to smooth over the darker, more unsettling elements that give Brontë’s story its power. Heathcliff’s race is an essential component of his marginalization and the cruelty he endures. With the casting of Jacob Elordi this is erased. In Brontë’s novel, Heathcliff’s ambiguous ethnicity fuels the prejudice and dehumanization he faces; it shapes his identity and his revenge. By casting Elordi, the film removes a crucial layer of the novel’s social commentary, reducing his character to just a love interest.
The film further distorts Brontë’s vision by recasting Catherine primarily as a victim of abuse, a choice that fundamentally alters the dynamic between her and Heathcliff. In the novel, Catherine is not powerless; she is privileged. Though she shares a deep bond with Heathcliff, she ultimately chooses social advancement and security over him, declaring that it would “degrade” her to marry him. Her decision is not the product of victimhood, but of internalized class hierarchy. Catherine chooses to participate in the very system that has oppressed Heathcliff. In Fennel’s framing of Catherine as a victim, the film collapses that divide and transforms their conflict into something external, or out of their control, rather than the result of Catherine’s own pride and complicity. In doing so, it simplifies a relationship that was meant to be morally uncomfortable.
Even more troubling is the film’s treatment of Isabella Linton. In the novel, Isabella’s marriage to Heathcliff is not a gothic love affair, but a brutal lesson in manipulation and abuse. Her suffering exposes the destructive reality of Heathcliff’s obsession and challenges any temptation to romanticize him. Fennell’s adaptation softens this abuse, in order to keep viewers swooning for Heathcliff and completely minimizing Isabella Linton’s character to a mere joke, when in the novel her immense bravery of leaving Heathcliff is a masterful critique of toxic devotion. Without Isabella’s storyline fully realized, the complexity of the story collapses.
Perhaps the film’s greatest failure is it’s reduction of Wuthering Heights to a sweeping love story. Brontë’s novel is not a romance meant to inspire longing, it is a cautionary tale about obsession as a destructive force. We are not meant to yearn for a relationship like Catherine and Heathcliff, we are meant to see the horrors of what obsessive love can turn into. Their inability to separate love from possession ends in the demise not only of themselves, but the next generation, a plot point that is completely ignored by Fennel. Fennel chose to disregard the entire second half of the novel, opting instead to paint the ending of the movie as a tragedy rooted in Heathcliff’s supposed yearning, when in the novel after Catherine’s death, Heathcliff incants decades of revenge on the next generation of Earnshaws and Linton’s.
Beyond the personal tragedy, Wuthering Heights is also a work of social commentary. Heathcliff’s ambiguous ethnicity and outsider status exposes the hierarchies of race and class that structure the world of the novel. His suffering is not emotional. It is systematic, and he repeats the cycle by enacting his cruel revenge. Fennel’s erasure of this dimension reduced his story to merely a melodrama. In prioritizing longing over social reality, the adaptation transforms a masterclass in social commentary into little more than a badly written period romance.
