Emily Brontë’s sole novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), has been adapted for the screen once again. For those who grew up with "Great Illustrated Classics" or the black-and-white Laurence Olivier version, expectations were likely high for a story of yearning, obsession, and a love that transcends death on the desolate, windswept moors. However, Emerald Fennell—the director behind Promising Young Woman, a tale of a woman’s seven-year quest for revenge—has crafted a version that is anything but a bedtime story.
The film opens with a public hanging in an 18th-century English town. In this bleak, crude, and eerie setting, death is a form of entertainment for the masses. This grim atmosphere sets the stage for Catherine, the daughter of the Earnshaw family living at the windswept "Wuthering Heights." When her alcoholic father brings home a scruffy waif from the streets, Heathcliff becomes both Catherine’s companion and the target of abuse. They grow into soulmates in the cold isolation of the moors, but once Catherine marries Edgar, this romance devolves into a harrowing horror drama.
● The Cold Wind Still Blows at Wuthering Heights
Brontë’s original work is a vast saga spanning two families and three generations, dealing with intense love, relentless revenge, and eventual literary reconciliation. Fennell’s 136-minute film aggressively condenses these events. By removing key figures like Hindley and Little Catherine, and blurring the generational shift to the children of Catherine and Heathcliff, the film relies heavily on the star power of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi to drive its rapid-fire narrative. Fennell chooses to focus almost entirely on the tragic emotional core between the two leads.
While the emotional bond between young Cathy (Charlotte Melington) and young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) builds strong anticipation for their adult romance, any hope for a radical union between a hollow aristocrat and a lowly servant is quickly extinguished. The adult leads find no outlet for their inner fire, especially as Edgar and Isabella Linton intervene. Unlike the novel, where the maid Nelly serves as a crucial observer, here she lacks the agency to influence their grand, tragic arc.
Fennell goes beyond turning a fairy tale into a mature love story; she transforms it into a tale of destructive erotica. Characters are pushed to extremes—the servant Joseph awakens "Catherine’s wildness," and Isabella becomes Heathcliff’s "dog" under the weight of his fury. At this point, the immortal romance shifts genres into a modern drama of obsession and madness.
Wuthering Heights is often compared to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Unfortunately, Fennell focuses on the lowlier aspects of that comparison, drowning the weight of the literature and the depth of emotion in Yorkshire mist and Hollywood visuals. If you cannot revisit Laurence Olivier’s classic, you would be better off carefully re-reading Emily Brontë’s original novel. By Jae-hwan Park, Seoul (2026)
