There is no shortage of irony in the uproar surrounding the newest adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The novel by Emily Brontë has been adapted repeatedly since its 1847 publication, and nearly every version has sparked debate. This time, however, the controversy feels amplified. Director Emerald Fennell — whose previous films include Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023) — brought a reputation for provocation with her to the Yorkshire moors. Audiences arrived primed either for brilliance or for excess.
What they received was both — and something closer to the novel’s emotional temperature than many expected.
The Romance Audiences Thought They Knew
For decades, Heathcliff and Catherine have been enshrined as tragic lovers, their devotion quoted and aestheticized across pop culture. The novel, however, is not a romance in any conventional sense. It is a study in fixation, pride and inherited cruelty. Heathcliff’s love manifests as vengeance. Catherine’s love is inseparable from ambition and ego. Their bond leaves collateral damage in its wake.
In that regard, Fennell’s film is not a betrayal of Brontë but a blunt translation. The outrage from some viewers appears rooted less in what the film changes than in what audiences assumed the story had always been.
What the Film Removes
Where the adaptation diverges most sharply from the book is structural. Brontë’s novel unfolds through layers of narration: first Mr. Lockwood, the outsider tenant, then Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who recounts the Earnshaw family’s history. This framing device creates distance and ambiguity. Readers receive Catherine and Heathcliff through recollection and bias, a technique that renders them spectral, flickering between myth and memory.
Fennell eliminates that narrative mediation. Lockwood disappears entirely. Nelly remains present but stripped of her storyteller function. Events are shown directly, not filtered through hearsay. The result is immediacy at the expense of narrative complexity. Heathcliff’s brutality is no longer a story told about him; it is witnessed. Catherine’s deterioration unfolds without interpretive commentary. The ambiguity of recollection gives way to visual assertion.
The film also truncates the novel’s second half. In Brontë’s text, the children of Catherine and Heathcliff’s circle inherit the emotional wreckage of the first generation. The eventual bond between Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw offers a tentative suggestion of renewal. Fennell, like several earlier filmmakers, sidesteps much of that generational reckoning. By narrowing her focus to the original pair, she intensifies the story’s claustrophobia. Redemption becomes peripheral, not central.
What Remains Intact
Despite these structural changes, the emotional architecture of the novel survives. Catherine still chooses Edgar Linton for security and status, fully aware of what that decision will cost her. Heathcliff still returns with wealth and a vendetta, determined to dismantle the structures that once humiliated him. Isabella Linton still becomes collateral in a marriage rooted in spite rather than affection (except this time, she wears the dog collar instead of Heathcliff killing her beloved puppy). The mechanics of revenge, inheritance and emotional retaliation remain largely unaltered.
The moors continue to function as more than a backdrop. In Brontë’s prose, the landscape mirrors volatility and isolation. Fennell preserves that symbolism, even if she renders it with greater visual aggression. The wind is not romantic; it is punishing, a constant reminder that these characters are alone. The terrain does not cradle the lovers; it dwarfs them, and seems to swallow them whole.
Style as Statement
Fennell’s most controversial decisions are aesthetic. Thrushcross Grange gleams with theatrical excess (Cathy’s skin-themed bedroom, the bloody-floored library with the plaster-hand fireplace, etc.). Costumes swell beyond strict historical realism (the cellophane dress, the crude amounts of bright red, etc.). The score oscillates between orchestral sweep and contemporary pulse, a masterful artistry featuring Charlie XCX. These choices pull the story slightly out of its period confines, signaling that Catherine and Heathcliff’s obsessions transcend a single century.
The approach recalls Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), which layered modern music and stylization over an 18th-century setting to highlight emotional confinement. Fennell’s method is less restrained. Where Brontë’s novel often suggests psychological torment through narration, the film insists on making it visible. Walls glow red. Rain saturates bodies. Interiors feel suffocating rather than merely elegant.
For some viewers, that visual excess eclipses the story’s quieter emotional corrosion. For others, it underscores it.
Casting, Controversy and Cultural Memory
The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff reignited longstanding debates about the character’s racial ambiguity. Brontë describes Heathcliff in terms that have prompted varied scholarly interpretations, and film history has largely defaulted to white actors in the role, with notable exceptions such as Andrea Arnold’s 2012 adaptation. Fennell’s choice continues that tradition, though it arrives in a cultural moment more attuned to questions of representation.
Margot Robbie’s Catherine, meanwhile, leans into volatility and vanity with equal force. The pair’s onscreen chemistry has divided critics. Some see combustible intensity. Others argue that the spectacle of the production reduces their connection to tableau.
A Faithful Provocation
If the film falters, it does so in its risk of overwhelming its own emotional core. The production design dazzles. The wardrobe astonishes. At times, the aesthetic spectacle threatens to dwarf the psychological inevitability that defines Brontë’s tragedy. The novel’s power lies in the sense that Catherine and Heathcliff are locked into mutual destruction long before they recognize it themselves.
Still, labeling the adaptation outrageous misreads its intent. Fennell does not sentimentalize the pair. She does not soften Heathcliff into a brooding romantic hero or frame Catherine as a purely sympathetic victim. Instead, she restores the brutality that many adaptations have muted.
Viewers who entered expecting sweeping romance may have felt disoriented. What they encountered instead was a feral, punishing love story that resists comfort. In stripping away decades of romantic gloss, the film returns Wuthering Heights to its original register: not as a tale of love triumphant, but as one of love uncontained — and devastating.
Wuthering Heights is a tragedy designed to haunt, and Fennell did just that.