Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: A Radical & Controversial Adaptation

The rumours are true about writer/director Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.”

First off, no, that’s not a typo. The “adaptation” of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel literally has quotation marks in its title — a stylistic choice, the movie’s media team is quick to note, that should always be maintained when reporting on it. It’s a pointed reference, Fennell has indicated, to the fact that this is not a traditional adaptation.

Instead, it’s a re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn director had reading the book as a teenager. The result is a visually striking – if emotionally muted – re-interpretation of the doomed connection between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie).

Which would be an ambitious undertaking if the changes to the source material felt like a deliberate attempt to reinvent the story for a modern audience, instead of, at best, a misreading of Brontë’s intentions, or, at worst, a transformation of Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” into something barely recognizable as Wuthering Heights at all.

Sadly, it often feels like the latter. Like Fennell’s previous work, including her Broadway adaptation of Bad Cinderella, she seems less interested in faithfully translating Brontë’s story than in provoking a reaction. The film opens with a scene that has already generated considerable discussion: a hanged man displayed in a town square, with onlookers reacting to a… visibly swollen appendage. This scene, notably, does not appear in the book’s opening pages.

The changes extend far beyond this initial shock value. A significant point of contention is the casting of Elordi, given the original character’s description as possessing a complexion that was “as dark almost as if it came from the devil,” and a longing for “light hair and a fair skin.” While previous adaptations have cast white actors in the role, Fennell’s decision has been criticized for overlooking the significance of Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial background – a background that, according to some interpretations, was intentionally left open-ended by Brontë to highlight his position on England’s social ladder.

Fennell has stated she cast Elordi based on her own imagined version of the character. After this initial shock, the film seemingly settles into a more familiar pattern. A nameless man rescues a young boy, bringing him home to be raised alongside his daughter, Catherine, and housekeeper, Nelly (Hong Chau). The decades that follow see Heathcliff and Catherine become consumed by a volatile obsession, dragging everyone around them into a cycle of vengeance, and despair.

This is where the film’s most significant departure from the novel occurs. While the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is present in the book, it occupies roughly one-third of the narrative, serving as an inciting incident for the broader themes of revenge and social climbing. Fennell, however, expands this section to dominate the film, transforming their doomed love into the central focus. The second half of the novel is largely omitted, effectively removing the story’s core message.

The success of an adaptation shouldn’t be solely judged on its fidelity to the source material. Adaptations like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a loose reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey, and Damon Lindelof’s HBO series Watchmen, which took a drastically different approach to Alan Moore’s graphic novel, demonstrate that creative reinterpretations can be successful. However, Fennell’s approach feels less like a remix and more like a willful misinterpretation.

The film abandons the novel’s exploration of rigid social hierarchies and the desire to overcome them. Brontë’s recurring theme of death as a comforting escape is minimized. And, most critically, Fennell’s interpretation of the central “love story” feels largely invented. Her insistence on recreating her teenage, romanticized vision of the novel results in a film that feels more like a melodramatic soap opera than a faithful adaptation.

Heathcliff is transformed from a sociopathic character driven by vengeance into a brooding, idealized figure. The film’s aesthetic, with its anachronistic costumes and set design, feels more akin to Tim Burton’s work than a historically accurate portrayal of 19th-century England. The result is a film that, while visually arresting, ultimately fails to capture the depth and complexity of Brontë’s original work. It’s an interesting oddity, but not necessarily a good movie.