Dami Duti explores why Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights fails to capture the ideas at the heart of Emily Brontë’s novel.

After finishing Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights this February, I was taken aback by how much I disliked it. Truthfully, I had prejudices about this film before walking into the movie theatre, aware of the critiques following the casting of Heathcliff as a white man. Beyond this, as someone who had never divulged into Fennell’s work, I was apprehensive of the extravagance of the film’s visuals and erotically themed advertising. However, my dislike of this film goes beyond its imagery or how loose the word ‘adaptation’ becomes – although there is something to be said of that – it lies within what Fennell tries to argue about Wuthering Heights whilst being preoccupied with depicting as many sex scenes as possible. What this film fails to reflect upon, because the director is ‘boiling down the things about the book that [she] found exciting’, is the subversion of human instinct and societal conceptions which is at the heart of Brontë’s novel. In fact, it seems to do the opposite.

A striking feature of this film, and one of the main reasons for its popularity, is its stream of erotic scenes, ramping up a reproductive primal instinct between male and female. Fennell puts it perfectly herself, she is ‘boiling down’ what she claims to be the ‘greatest love story of all time’ into a simple litany of sex scenes that is otherwise unstrung together by a supposed ‘love story’. Fennell claims she is only taking ‘a tiny piece of the book’ and trying to ‘make sense of it’. This largely appears to be the irresistible physical chemistry between Catherine and Heathcliff, a concept that is never explicitly said in the novel and arguably, never implicitly mentioned but rather countered by Catherine herself: ‘he shall never know how I love him; not because he’s handsome, Nelly.’ However, of course Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is extremely erotic and the film rightly picks up on this. It is a tone in the novel which is created by the contrast and friction between the concepts of forbiddance and transgression. Fennell’s ‘wish fulfilment’ in her portrayal of Catherine escaping the grapples of her marriage to Edgar Linton to have an explicit sexual affair with Heathcliff, eradicates this. There is hardly any sense of the suffocation which confines the novel. It seems that Fennell cannot trust her audiences to interpret erotic tension unless it is within the realm of sexual intercourse, perhaps one factor that contributes to the exaggerated costuming and glaringly obvious symbolism.

The Gothic eroticism in Wuthering Heights is interpreted by Fennell (and by proxy her non-reader audience) as simple carnal desire. The director claims that adaptation has no ‘rules anymore’ and that ‘the more playful people are, the better,’ which is echoed in various reviews of the film, where others claim that the movie does not have to be accurate as long as it is entertaining or interesting. Naturally, there is an underlying anti-intellectualism in these opinions, a pushback against the ‘prudes and pearl-clutchers’ (as Lillian Crawford puts it), but there is also a sentiment echoed by readers and non-readers alike that no adaptation will ever truly encompass Brontë’s genius, therefore wildness in adaptation should be encouraged. This discourse all falls apart when the adaptation diminishes real-world issues of systemic racism, sexism and abuse for the purpose of trying to make a film that feels disturbed just enough to still be perversely enjoyable without having to acknowledge politics.

In defence of her white-washed casting, Fennell states that ‘you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,’ implying that when she read the constant racial slurs thrown at Heathcliff and his being diminished into a slave by Hindley (who is conveniently not in the film), she imagined a white man, highlighting her own wilful ignorance. I believe there are a multitude of reasons for this casting, none of which concern themselves with the true character of Heathcliff, despite the fact that Fennell claims that ‘the thing that is endlessly wonderful about Wuthering Heights, really, is Emily Brontë.’ Firstly, Jacob Elordi peaked in popularity with Fennell’s Saltburn; according to an article written for Vox magazine by Alex Abad-Santos in 2023, ‘There is no man in Hollywood as tall, as popular, or as beautiful as Jacob Elordi.’

Saltburn grossed roughly twenty-one million dollars in the worldwide box office, therefore, this casting may have been driven by monetary interest. Fennell claims that as a director she is ‘looking to get into a space where you are looking at the most interesting, the most alive, the most complicated version of everything.’ This partly explains the visual vivacity of the film, and why it is ultimately so hollow, for this statement cannot be true at the same time as her motivations for the adaption. However, this statement also implies that racism and slavery would dampen her ‘devastatingly sexy film.’ I did not find this film devastating. Racism is devastating. Erasing Heathcliff’s oppression as a person of colour is not only an affront to Emily Brontë’s character, but to an audience who are currently witnessing the catastrophic effects of rising fascism and white supremacy, particularly in the United States. The white-washing of Heathcliff is not an isolated event and I will not treat it as such. It is an insult. 

This same sentiment applies to my opinion on the presentation of Isabella. In an article for the Guardian, journalist Emma Flint discusses how sexual violence victims are blamed in many abusive relationships, claiming that ‘The onus is placed on the victim; they’re the cause of their pain because they apparently consented. It’s one of numerous ways of excusing violence against women,’ and she relates this to the presentation of Isabella in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. ‘For abuse survivors, to see Isabella become an objectified caricature is alarming.’ Fennell depicts Isabella as a willing participant in an abusive relationship, even going so far as to dehumanise her in portraying Isabella acting like a dog for Heathcliff’s pleasure.

Once again, she conveniently excludes what truly constitutes Isabella’s transcendent character, her brave escape from their abusive relationship and rejection of Heathcliff. It is important that in Wuthering Heights, Brontë lets Isabella describe this in her own voice through a letter, ‘‘he snatched a dinner-knife from the table and flung it at my head. […]; but, pulling it out, I sprang to the door and delivered another; […] and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road.” Emily Brontë depicts a woman who discovers that the man she has married is truly of the devil, and decides against all odds to fight against her oppressor for her own sake and for the sake of the son she births only a few months after her escape. Fennell completely defaces this character.

Furthermore, Fennell claims, ‘I don’t know that any transcendent art made by a woman couldn’t be feminist.’ I must argue that this film is not a piece of transcendent art, neither is it feminist. Fennell’s purpose with this film is to ‘acknowledge [her] connection to it’, which is not an uncommon reason for creating an adaptation, however there is a reason for its shallowness. Joseph is reduced into a spry young servant eager to have BDSM sex with Zillah, a character who in the novel served as a constant, ancient and religious reminder of the doom that will come to the best and especially, worst of us. There is no God in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”.

Although Brontë, as Fennell says, remains ‘amoral’ in her judgement of her characters, the characters within this film also lack morality, leaving our damned Catherine and Heathcliff with no chance of salvation. The characters lack a reverence of death that was so poignant in the novel, and a fear of its fruition which created the existential friction that drove the narrative. Death in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights represents hope: for peace, for salvation, for unity, and for reprieve from suffering. This is most present in Fennell’s adaptation during the scenes leading up to and including Catherine’s death, however death becomes isolated in “Wuthering Heights” for hers and Mr. Earnshaw’s are the only ones we see, barring the glimpses we see of hanged criminals. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights reeks of death, it is haunted by constant reminders of it. Furthermore, the new generation of characters, which are completely removed from Fennell’s adaptation, provide hope for the mistakes of the old to be rectified, a generation which was killed in Fennell’s Catherine by the insatiable lust between her and Heathcliff; symbolic in and of itself, for this same lust is why this film is dead. 

Sources:

1. https://writingstudio.co.za/wuthering-heights-in-conversation-with-writer-director-producer-emerald-fennell/
2. https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/emerald-fennell-influences-wuthering-heights 
3. https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/emerald-fennell-wuthering-heights-adaptation-interview 
4. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a70175560/wuthering-heights-emerald-fennell-interview-2026/ 
5. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/emerald-fennell-defends-changes-wuthering-heights-book-film_uk_6993301be4b0000f64157021 
6. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/20/rough-sex-defence-emerald-fennell-wuthering-heights-isabella-linton