When adapting a well-known book onto the big screen, there always comes a very tight rope you need to walk on in order to make a winner out of it. Not only do you have to make it work as a faithful adaption to it’s source material that longtime fans will love, but you also have to make it work as it’s own self-contained story that can land with mainstream audiences who have never read the book (or any book) beforehand and coming into this one with fresh eyes. We’ve seen many times where film adaptions can make changes to it’s source material but still win the hearts of everyone by staying true to it’s origins such as Jurassic Park, How To Train Your Dragon, and (hopefully) Project Hail Mary while also seen adaptations surprisingly fall short BECAUSE of sticking to close to it’s origins and refusing to make changes such as The Running Man (2025) and (hopefully not) Dune: Messiah! Then you get adaptions like Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, that doesn’t seem interested in celebrating it’s successful book series it’s based on but more of making it’s own engaging story of it while wanting nothing to do with it’s book’s origins and is basically only a film adaption in name only. An adaption that seems to wants to be EVERYTHING but have to do with it’s own source material.
I’m not gonna pretend like I’m an expert on the Wuthering Heights series because I sure as heck am NOT but after doing my research on it before seeing the film, I can see why longtime fans of the book would have a grudge against this latest film iteration done by Emerald Fennell. Yes, the film puts the spotlight on a tragic yet heartfelt love story that puts the novel’s themes surrounding abuse and trauma to the wayside. Yes, the two main leads are about 10 to 15 years older on screen than they are in the novel! Yes, Fennell seems to be less interested in exploring the longing of the source material and more interested in plain lust here. And yes, the dark skinned male lead from the novel is replaced by a white, caucasian man (No fault to Jacob Elordi!) in the finished film.
This isn’t so much a fan fiction of Wuthering Heights but more of just plain fiction that’s a response to other fan fiction out there. It’s more of Emerald Fennell wanting to tell her own romantic tale that I’m sure she’s dreamed off since she was a little girl while desperately trying to do her best Greta Gerwig’s Little Women impression. Regardless of what angle you chose to look at this latest take on Wuthering Heights, it just doesn’t work.
Premise: A passionate and tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, exploring the intense and destructive relationship between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie).
As much as there has been a strange hate boner towards Emerald Fennell in the film twitter community, I do find her to be a very talented director. Her debut feature film, Promising Young Woman, was a masterclass of a thriller that was perfectly executed in it’s social commentary of the post-Me Too era while containing one of boldest endings of any film in recent memory. Saltburn made for a worthy sophomore follow-up even though you can hear the gears turning and the perfectly straight forward pathway that Fennell lays out from the very beginning this time around. Say what you will about the narrative and structural choices of those films but you can at least see where she was going with it and her vision felt 100% present throughout. With Wuthering Heights, I’m not entirely sure what Emerald was trying to do here.
For the first half, you think it’s about a broken man and woman who grew up together and bonded under the shadow of abuse of their elder while slowly and chaotically becoming obsessed with one another the older they got, similar to the themes of it’s source material. But then, as soon as the first passionately loving scene between the two comes around at the halfway point, nearly all of that gets shoved entirely to the background in favor of several sequences of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi making out and relentlessly having sex with one another.
I’m sure there are many men out there that are in love with Margot Robbie and many women out there that are in love with Jacob Elordi but Emerald Fennell seems to think that’s all what anyone is coming to this film for. Just for two very attractive people doing things that two very attractive people like to do with one another. And if she thinks that’s the case, then what was even the point of teasing your faithfulness to Wuthering Heights in the first place if you wanted to make your own hot and steamy film about two people that just wanna pork each other with for an hour and a half?
To be sure, the sex scenes in particular are quite tasteful and well done. Fennell clearly is getting the best out of Robbie and Elordi in these sequences, even if the two are about seven years apart in real life. Their chemistry only ever works during these parts, of being two individuals so chained to their tragic lifestyles that it’s only when they are together and f**king that they feel the most like themselves. But considering, these sequences don’t take place until around the halfway point and I’m sure if you combined every sex scene all together that you will only get around ten total minutes of the film’s 136 minute long runtime of them, you might be better off just waiting for the film to hit digital or until someone uploads a compilation of every one of those scenes on YouTube.
The problem here is that the film doesn’t particularly care about wanting the audience to root for Cathy and Heathcliff to get together. It thinks that just because the two knew each other since they were kids and went through some form of childhood trauma that we are expected to invest in their love triangle when they become adults. And considering both show constantly throughout the film that they can’t even be bothered to care about the partners that they are ALREADY committed to, I can’t even imagine a world where the two end up together in the end as a real happy ending.
I don’t want to be the person that compares the new Wuthering Heights to Fifty Shades of Grey but at least the latter is well aware that the audience is ONLY there for the love scenes and sexual tension throughout. It knows that the plot, characters, and themes are absolute dog water that makes Twilight look like a competently told love story in comparison. You only want to see Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan find weird and disturbing ways to bone one another in ways that is only BARELY suitable for film form. While nowhere near as bad or offensive as Fifty Shades of Grey and the best parts certainly work better as a more sexually satisfying experience, Wuthering Heights can’t function properly on it’s own merits because it’s trapped underneath it’s own weight of it’s source material that it’s actively trying to avoid.
That’s not to say there’s no redeemable qualities whatsoever that doesn’t involve the two main leads doing the awkward parent talk. The production design is absolutely lavish, with convincing costume designs, set aesthetics, and location shootings that perfectly mirror the time period that the film itself is set in. Margot Robbie NEVER phones it in with any movie that she is a part off, making an unwinnable situation to her best advantage and taking a great oath to making 2026’s Wuthering Heights work as a theatrical experience. And while there will be (much deserved) discourse surrounding the potential resurrection of whitewashing which may or may not be Hollywood’s ill-fated response to the current political climate, Jacob Elordi works well as the handsome, lustful male lead that is masterful at making his charms disguise his chaotic hidden nature.
When viewing Wuthering Heights as a proper date night movie for Valentine’s Day weekend to get a certain young couple in the “mood” by the time the credits roll, it’s passable at best. When viewing Wuthering Heights as a faithful adaption or a stand alone cinematic experience, it’s a misfire. It’s caught between trying to be a slow burn haunting tale of two people that believe they are faithfully forced to be together and being a straight up sex-filled craved fantasy with no substance required. If the runtime consisted of 90 to 105 minutes, it could have gotten away with it. At a total of 136 minutes, no chance.
I don’t know how this film would have fared if Fennell chose to stick with the actual roots of the source material but it feels like she went over her head here. Not necessarily because she believes she’s better than the source material but more she believes the source material is better than her. When taking that into consideration, it makes sense as to why you shouldn’t try honoring the material because it’s too special to be messed with and just create new material of your own that may or may not bring new medium to the title which the book is based on. If this is how Emerald truly saw her head at here, than this was basically doomed from the start.
Strong performances and production values can not mask the faults of a film so empty, overlong, and directionless in it’s own vision. I’ll still defend Promising Young Woman and Saltburn but as for this one, sorry Emerald, you are on your own!
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