Wuthering Heights 2026 is a historical gothic romance movie based on the novel by Emily Brontë from 1847. The Director, Emerald Fanning, is most well known for previously directing the movies Saltburn (2023) and Promising Young Woman (2020). It follows the rough upbringing and eventual romance of the characters Catherine Evershaw and Heathcliff. Wuthering Heights caught my attention through the uproar of controversies it sparked on the internet through many of its stark creative liberties and changes from the original book. I tried to go into this movie with as little expectations as possible. I saw many negative reviews on social media for the movie but I wanted to keep my mind as open as possible and I wanted this movie to pleasantly surprise me. I was not pleasantly surprised by this movie. While I found there to be a few artistically compelling aspects of the movie, overall, I did not enjoy the experience. I must note beforehand that this review contains many spoilers for both the movie and book.
One of the few things I did enjoy about the movie was the soundtrack composed by Charli Xcx. The movie opens with a jarring scene of a man being hung outside of wuthering heights, the song “House” plays and it helps to make the scene much more horrific and memorable. Her music adds much more emotion to the film and overall improves many of the scenes, especially in scenes where the film was lacking.
The first act of the film is dedicated to young Catherine and Heathcliff living together at Wuthering Heights after young Heathcliff is taken as a servant off the street by Catherine’s father. The young love of Heathcliff and Catherine was easily the most compelling part of the film. Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington give great performances as the young versions of Heathcliff and Catherine. The two have great chemistry and the movie does well at showing the abuse of Catherine’s father and how it affects the two and brings them closer together. It does well to make the viewer actually feel something about the characters. That much is something I cannot say about the rest of the movie.
After the first act comes Catherine and Heathcliff as young adults, A new wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton, moves into a mansion close by Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s father has turned into a drunken gambler and Catherine fears that she may have to marry Edgar in order for their family to not go poor with her fathers gambling. All the while, she begins to realize that she was in love with Heathcliff. One compliment I must give to this act is that many of these scenes do great at showing off the beautiful scenery of the locations the movie was filmed in, such as the Moors of Yorkshire National Park.
She agrees to marry Edgar and immediately regrets it. She speaks to her servant Nelly about how she loves Heathcliff but cannot marry him because they would be poor if she did, Heathcliff overhears. She decides to call off the wedding. But before she can, she discovers that Heathcliff had run away from Wuthering Heights in the night. She marries Edgar. After several years, she becomes pregnant with his child. One day, Heathcliff suddenly returns incredibly rich. Catherine invites Heathcliff to dinner, she becomes jealous when he shows interest in her sister in law. Heathcliff tells her it was her fault for what she had said years earlier. She tells him she would have married him instead had he not run away. After she reveals this, the two begin having a secret affair.
The second act is where the movie first started to lose me. After Heathcliff returns to Wuthering heights, his and Catherine’s relationship becomes incredibly dull. They lack much of the chemistry they had at the beginning of the movie and the two constantly flip between madly in love and bitterly jealous for seemingly no discernible reason. Once Catherine reveals her true feelings to him, their relationship becomes much less of a romance and more of just a constant, unbroken slew of sex scenes. Their relationship in this act just becomes incredibly boring and annoying.
In the Third act, Catherine reveals to Heathcliff that she is pregnant with Edgar’s child and that their affair must stop. Up to this point, Edgar had also become increasingly angry about her affection towards Heathcliff. Heathcliff then runs off and marries Catherine’s sister in law, Isabella, in order to make Catherine jealous. He waits at Wuthering Heights for Catherine to come back to him. Catherine attempts to send letters to Heathcliff but her servant Nelly refuses to deliver them because she believes she is being selfish. Several months pass and eventually Catherine dies of sepsis from a miscarriage, the final scene of the movie is Heathcliff crying over Catherine’s dead body, to which the movie then abruptly ends.
It’s hard to feel sad over these characters when much of their pain is caused by their own bad decisions. Again, much of the conflict in this act feels dull. The final scene holds very little weight due to the lack of chemistry that existed between them during the majority of the movie. Catherine and Heathcliff both share the same self-inflicted problem; they have chosen not to be together and to be bitter towards each other about it. There is no tragedy felt in this act because it feels like Catherine and Heathcliff’s inability to be together is not caused by the unfortunate circumstances of life but rather by their own stupidity. The movie fails to properly explain the source of Nelly’s longtime bitterness towards Catherine and the movie never explains how Heathcliff got his riches in any way. The cherry on top is the fact that despite being several months pregnant, Catherine at no point ever has a baby bump.
Director of Wuthering Heights Emerald Fanning has said in her interview with WMagazine that her goal of the movie was not to create a fully book accurate adaptation of Wuthering Heights but rather to attempt to invoke the same feelings that the novel originally made her feel when she first read it at the age of 14. I took this into consideration when watching the movie. While I do not believe that a movie adaptation has to be fully faithful to its original source in order to be great, many of the changes made from the original book felt to be in either poor taste or just generally worse off for the characters and the story. For example one of the greatest controversies surrounding the movie was the casting of the white actor Jacob Elordi as the role of Heathcliff. Heathcliff was an orphan found on the streets and taken in as a servant to Catherine’s father. In the books he is described as having dark skin and being of non European origin. The decision to ignore that part of Heathcliff’s character takes away from complexities of his character and his story in favor of a more watered down and white washed version of the character, which we see in the movie. Along with the whitewashing of Heathcliff as a character, the movie also sanitizes much of his character while at the same time watering down the character of Isabella linton. In the book, Isabella faces physical and mental abuse from Heathcliff, she becomes pregnant with his child and ultimately runs away from him with her child to escape his abuse. In the movie, all of that is cut in favor of Isabella participating in “consensual pet play” with Heathcliff including a scene where he has her literally chained up and barking like a dog and she is shown to enjoy it. This change feels like it only serves to grossly downplay Heathcliff’s cruelty and justify it by saying that she ‘liked it’. Along with that, in this movie, Isabella’s character essentially only exists as a set piece to further the story of Catherine and Heathcliff. My only guess is that Emerald meant to portray some sort of theme of “sexual empowerment” with this change, but it very much falls flat when the context of the book is taken into consideration. The movie’s overall choice to add in an excessive amount of unnecessary sex scenes that were not in the original book only adds to just how annoying it is. In general, it is a much flatter version of the story that Emily Brontë originally wrote.
Overall, The movie of Wuthering Heights is not just a bad adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel, but a stale insult to the original novel. The worst crime of this movie is just how unbelievably boring it is. The conflicts feel superficial and many of the characters just feel completely unlikeable. While there are many compliments you can give to the creatives who put hard work into this movie such as the actors, musicians and cinematographers, as a whole it falls flat in its storytelling and is genuinely hard to sit through. It was not worth my time or money. I would give the movie a ⅖ star rating and I would not recommend it to anyone.
