Between a whole new album soundtrack from Charli XCX, a leading actor uproar and morally questionable red carpet jewellery, there’s no doubt Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” has taken the internet by storm.
I went to see it in the cinema with two of my friends this week, and well….
Minor spoiler alert, but nothing I don’t think will disturb your own watching of the film. So, in my opinion, in compressing the novel’s sprawling, generational tragedy into a single doomed romance that ends at Cathy’s death, the film sacrifices the structural and moral weight that made Emily Brontë’s story so enduring.
Something that has sparked conversations and concerns online, with which I agree, is that in the novel, Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity and outsider status are central to his alienation and rage. Casting a conventionally privileged-looking white actor flattens that dynamic, reducing the character’s social marginalisation to mere brooding temperament. While Elordi leans into the romantic obsession of the role, the simmering brutality and class resentment that drive Heathcliff’s long revenge arc feel underdeveloped. And not to say that the performances were in any way bad, for example, Owen Cooper, who plays a young Heathcliff, is only another amazing performance for him to add to his repertoire.
The production design evokes windswept moors and candlelit interiors, but the film frequently blends period costuming with contemporary tonal cues, including modern music stylings and dialogue rhythms that feel distinctly 21st century. This hybrid approach may be intentional, but it weakens the social rigidity that defined early 19th-century Yorkshire. Without the strict class codes and patriarchal constraints of the era being fully realised, Catherine’s marriage choice and Heathcliff’s exclusion lose historical urgency.
To me, the film’s boldest and most criticised decision is to end the story shortly after Catherine dies, which personally shocked me. In the novel, her death marks the midpoint, not the conclusion. What follows is Heathcliff’s prolonged campaign of emotional cruelty, manipulation, and revenge against the next generation, culminating in a dark but redemptive closure. By stopping at Cathy’s death, the film reframes the narrative as a tragic love story rather than a multi-generational exploration of obsession and consequence. Heathcliff’s transformation from wounded lover to destructive tyrant is barely explored. The absence of the second generation removes the novel’s thematic spine: that hatred echoes, but can also be healed. The ending instead lingers on grief, memory, and romantic longing, a poetic but simplified resolution that romanticises what Brontë deliberately complicated.
Ultimately, I left the cinema not feeling I had watched an adaptation of the Wuthering Heights we all know, but instead almost a fanfiction depiction of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship from Cathy’s own perspective. To me, it feels like fanfiction from Cathy’s perspective because the film reshapes Wuthering Heights into a singular, emotionally centred romance that prioritises her longing, passion, and tragic death over the novel’s broader moral and generational consequences. By focusing almost exclusively on her inner turmoil, softening Heathcliff’s brutality, and ending the story when she dies, the adaptation reframes a harsh, multi-voiced gothic saga into what feels like Cathy’s own romanticized retelling, a version where the love is epic, the suffering is aestheticized, and the destructive aftermath that defines the second half of Brontë’s novel is largely erased. By ignoring the main issues and barriers in their relationship from the book, the movie instead simplifies and at times confuses the dynamic between the pair, which at some point made me question if by the time the pair are reunited on screen was the difference between them really that huge anymore to keep them apart?