‘Wuthering Heights’ Review: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi Lead a Divisive Take on Emily Brontë’s Classic

Like any canonical novel, Wuthering Heights almost invites—arguably deserves—a degree of irreverence. At this stage in its long adaptation cycle, the bare minimum would be an attempt to breathe new life into its pages. The real challenge is figuring out what to do, and how. Emerald Fennell, coming off Saltburn, is an unabashed maximalist who opts to jettison much of the novel—plotlines, characters, situations, even its spatial and temporal logic—in favor of a feature-length, ostensibly sensual chain of music-video set pieces. The aim seems to be a torrid, tragic love story streamlined for viewers with little patience for ambiguity or conflicts beyond the purely romantic. The result is diffuse and ultimately unsuccessful: a series of striking moments searching for a film to hold them together.

Fennell pointedly titles it “Wuthering Heights”, quotation marks included, as if to preempt complaints about fidelity. But the problem isn’t the postmodern re-reading itself—there have been many worthwhile ones. It’s a fundamental misreading of the characters and their dynamic, reduced here to a capital-P Passion that all but erases the surrounding world. Catherine and Heathcliff are, yes, doomed lovers, but the social forces that keep them apart—the very fabric of the world that denies them—are flattened into the kind of sketchy beats you’d expect from a teen soap, never quite reaching the density of true melodrama.

And yet it doesn’t begin badly. Viewers who found Saltburn irritating may sense, at least through the first half, that Fennell—perhaps daunted by the scale of the material—has dialed things down, settling into rhythms and tones that feel, if not faithful, at least spiritually adjacent to the novel. It’s still very much her—part circus, part eccentric pageant, with clashing colors and deliberately off-kilter choices—but for a while there’s a semblance of internal coherence.

The story opens with Cathy (Charlotte Mellington as a child, Margot Robbie as an adult), a fierce, unruly girl who becomes fascinated with a boy her alcoholic father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), brings home from Liverpool. Treated as both servant and adopted son, he’s named Heathcliff (Owen Cooper as a child, Jacob Elordi later on). The two grow inseparable, hovering in that charged space between friendship and desire that neither quite dares to cross.

Time passes. Now young adults—though noticeably older than their teenage counterparts in the novel, with the odd effect of Cathy appearing a decade older than him—they circle each other until the inevitable emotional rupture. Cathy loves Heathcliff but understands that his social standing makes marriage impossible; the wealthier Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) is, plainly, the “better match.” Heathcliff overhears what he perceives as betrayal—housekeeper Nelly (Hong Chau) plays a key role here—and disappears into the Yorkshire fog.

He returns transformed: wealthy, hardened, and looking every bit like Elordi in full brooding-heartthrob mode. He reenters Cathy’s now-married life, reigniting their connection—and the film pivots decisively into Fennell’s preferred register. A dozen stylized sequences unfold, set to original songs by Charli XCX; there’s passion, anguish, and a steady escalation of eroticized imagery. Yet the central relationship generates surprisingly little sexual tension: Elordi often seems to be performing for himself, while Robbie struggles to mask a conspicuous height mismatch that undermines their physical dynamic. By then, the film has shed any remaining narrative logic, only attempting—too late—to recover a trace of its initial emotional grounding. At that point, the spectacle has overtaken the movie.

Fennell’s compulsion to command attention becomes its own problem. Hardly a shot goes by without some excess or incongruity: a splash of aggressive red, a camera angle from an impossible vantage point, a hand repeatedly plunging into some gelatinous texture. These flourishes gesture toward significance but rarely achieve it. Social divisions and family tensions—the very elements that give the story weight—are sidelined, with entire characters and situations excised from the script. What remains is an erotic drama with faint echoes of Bridgerton, reducing everything to a dubious psychosexual conflict.

The film doesn’t fail because it takes risks—if anything, its notion of transgression feels oddly adolescent—but because of the banality it ultimately imposes on what is, in essence, a profoundly tragic story of ill-fated lovers.