Dr. Wife and I went to see Emerald Fennell’s adaptation/reinterpretation of Wuthering Heights (2026) the other weekend after a long day of lugging our stuff to our new home. The director’s name—which sounds like a extremely colorful spice—should give some insight into what the film was like. I’ve never read Emily Brontë novel—yes, literature girls, you can sacrifice me to Emily Dickinson—but Dr. Wife had, so she filled me in some of the details.
The original novel is the bleak tale of a doomed romance denied by the strictures of propriety, social class, and cash. The movie is an excessively plodding first act that culminates in twenty minutes of sexual depravity followed by a tragic death.
The film is gaining notoriety because it’s smut. My wife kept calling it “Wuthering Glutes,” and we had fun making jokes involving the word “wuthering” and other anatomical features. The popular consensus is correct: it is basically an excuse for a swarthy heartthrob to assert his will over Margot Robbie while women swoon lustily.
The film wasn’t total depravity, although it veered into Saltburn (2023) territory—which I just realized was also written, directed, and produced by Emerald Fennell! Well, that explains a lot. But I digress—the flick begins by showing the unhappy childhood of Cathy (Robbie) and Heathcliffe (Jacob Elordi). Cathy’s father is the drunken, gambling owner of Wuthering Heights, a rambling country pile that is falling into a state of disrepair somewhere in the northern England. One day, he comes home with a boy whose father was beating him; Cathy names the boy Heathcliffe after her dead brother.
Cathy and Heathcliffe become fast friends, with Cathy attempting to teach him how to read (unsuccessfully) and getting the boy, who she calls her “pet,” to speak. Cathy tends to be stubborn and reckless, which results in Heathcliffe taking a beating on her behalf.
The film fast forwards to their adult lives at Wuthering Heights. Cathy is clearly bored being trapped on the estate, and Heathcliffe keeps working, growing into a massive, muscular, bearded man. You can see where things are going here: the childhood friendship and deep devotion is turning into desire, and Heathcliffe is the romance novel heartthrob. Naturally, things change when a wealthy industrialist rolls into the area, constructing a massive, lavish estate. Cathy sees opportunity; Heathcliffe intuits a threat.
Cathy concocts a way to meet the new neighbors, Edgar Linton and his ward Isabella, and Linton soon proposes marriage. Heathcliffe overhears Cathy tell her lady-in-waiting Nelly that marrying him would “degrade” her, which causes him to ride off on horseback.
To get to that point in the story—the end of, essentially, the second act, takes an inordinate length of time. The first act, which consists of Cathy and Heathcliffe as children, runs on entirely too long. It really hammers away how miserable their lives are, and how tight money is, and how awful Cathy’s father is. There are a number of characters to set up, to be sure, but ultimately it’s just Cathy, her father, Heathcliffe, and Nelly in the first act. Edgar Linton and Isabella are the only other major characters, and they don’t really appear until the second act.
Instead, it’s an overly slow burn to get to the passionate shenanigans, which is what the movie is really about. It’s not a faithful adaptation (I turned to Dr. Wife and asked, “is that in the book?” when Heathcliffe has Isabella chained to a collar and eating from his hand like a dog; she said, “Absolutely not!”) of the book, but it doesn’t pretend to be; it’s goal seems to be to take an intense but restrained piece of Victorian literature and turn it into a dime bodice ripper.
I don’t mind all sorts of flawed characters in film; they make stories interesting. The problem is that we’re supposed to cheer for Cathy and Heathcliffe as they engage in a ruinous extramarital love affair. Girls in the theater said, “yes!” when Cathy and Heathcliffe finally started fooling around on her husband Edgar.
Keep in mind, Edgar is not portrayed monstrously: he dotes on his wife (perhaps too much), giving her excellent clothes, accommodations, food, and love. He is fun and fun-loving. When Nelly discreetly informs him of Cathy’s affair with Heathcliffe, he maintains his composure with his wife, curtly telling her that she should disengage with her “friend Mr. Heathcliffe” lest it look untoward. At this point in the film, Cathy is pregnant with Edgar’s child (and it’s absolutely his, as the child was conceived pre-Heathcliffe-related shenanigans). But Fennell is asking the audience to view Edgar as just another man trapping Cathy. Her father trapped her in the crumbling ruins of a once-great family; now Edgar traps her in a gilded cage.
But it’s nonsense. Heathcliffe returns to Wuthering Heights having gained his fortune in the world, and he is a brute. His youthful love for Cathy is now tinged with anger and jealousy, but the film asks us view his degradation of Cathy and Isabelle as some kind of hot, sexy move.
Under it all, though, there is a refreshing honest. Feminism in its late-stage form glorifies brutish, forceful men while viewing kind, supportive husbands as wallets to fund their dalliances. That seems to be what’s going on in Wuthering Heights—Cathy’s liberation comes when she is taken by Heathcliffe. In reality, she’s made a series of decisions that she’s unwilling to live with, so she goes on a hunger strike, killing herself and her baby.
The solipsism is real. Unfortunately, it’s why Wuthering Heights is making such waves with young female viewers—and we should all worry about that. Heathcliffe is not a good model for a healthy relationship (nor is Cathy)—but he is what women want.