Wuthering Heights 2026 Review: Emerald Fennell's Bold Take on Gothic Romance

Wuthering Heights 2026 Review: Emerald Fennell's Bold Take on Gothic Romance

When I first saw the trailer for Wuthering Heights 2026, I knew Emerald Fennell wasn't interested in delivering a traditional period drama. Indeed, Fennell's emphatically maximalist vision announces itself from the start, with quotation marks around the title serving as what she calls "a note of humility" to her singular interpretation. The film declares it will play by its own rules right from the beginning, featuring contemporary elements like a moody soundtrack by pop star Charli xcx alongside 18th-century Gothic settings. In this review, I'll examine the cast of Wuthering Heights 2026, including Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, explore Fennell's bold esthetic choices, and assess whether this polarizing adaptation succeeds in capturing the essence of Emily Brontë's classic novel.

Emerald Fennell's Vision: A Maximalist Approach to Classic Literature

Breaking from Traditional Adaptations

Fennell described wanting to recreate the experience of reading Wuthering Heights as a teenager, explaining she aimed to "make something that felt like the world of a 14-year-old girl reading this book for the first time". This meant the film would be "a little more heightened, or a little more anachronistic". Rather than faithfully adapting Brontë's text, she focused on approximating the way the book made her feel.

The quotation marks in the film's marketing signal this departure. Fennell took "the basic outline of Brontë's story and reframed it in a narrative that better represented the themes" she wanted to explore: "lust, love, and the maximalist ecstasy of a soul set free". Production designer Suzie Davies explained they were "aiming for an accuracy of feeling rather than period". Fennell explicitly stated, "We're not representing a moment in time at all".

Visual Excess and Anachronistic Styling

The production design operates on what Davies calls Fennell's philosophy: "There's no such thing as less is more; more is more". Every choice gets "turned up, dialed past restraint into something more operatic".

Costume designer Jacqueline Durran created looks that blend multiple eras. Her mood board for Cathy included Thierry Mugler, Alexander McQueen, German milkmaid styles, and fashion spanning Elizabethan through contemporary periods. The result? Costumes that are "an imagined version of a period costume" rather than historically accurate pieces.

The sets embrace surrealism equally. Wuthering Heights features sky-high piles of empty bottles and walls that literally sweat as moisture drips down surfaces. Thrushcross Grange contains rooms with plaster hands holding candles, a floor painted with a trompe l'oeil map, and Catherine's bedroom with walls made from printed images of Margot Robbie's skin covered in stretched latex.

The Use of Modern Soundtrack and Production Design

Charli XCX's companion album provides what she calls a "raw, wild, sexual, gothic and British" sound. The anachronistic music follows a tradition established by directors like Baz Luhrmann, who argued that using hip-hop in The Great Gatsby made sense because "the jazz music of the 1920s was an exciting movement helmed by Black musicians, and he argued that hip-hop was the modern day equivalent".

Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren drew inspiration from unusual sources, looking at "disgusting stuff" like "the interior structure of the heart, and its relationship to a tree". This approach freed them from conventional realism, creating what Sandgren described as a world where "the realism is Emerald's world".

Cast Performances and Chemistry

The cast of Wuthering Heights 2026 brings star power, though performances vary wildly in effectiveness.

Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw

Robbie layers her Cathy with careful cruelty and spite, allowing the character to be completely unlikable when necessary. She quietly switches gears to lean into Cathy's fragility and childlike innocence, making every decision believable. Robbie herself described Cathy as "such a bitch," noting the character has agency in making choices and dealing with consequences rather than being someone things happen to. At 35, she's significantly older than Brontë's teenage Catherine.

Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff

Elordi's height, face, and naturally deep voice do considerable heavy lifting in creating Heathcliff. While the camera loves him and audiences respond to his hauntingly interesting looks, his characterization remains surface-level. The film blatantly shows his tortured inner workings rather than relying on Elordi to convey depth through eyes and actions. At 28, he's also notably older than the source material's teenage character.

Supporting Cast: Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, and Hong Chau

Alison Oliver steals scenes as Isabella Linton, playing the character's obsession with terrifying teenage-crush energy. She goes completely "balls to the wall," offering a stabilizing throughline with her batshit performance. Hong Chau delivers controlled emotions seething beneath the surface as Nelly, achieving the perfect combination of inner resentment and discipline. Shazad Latif provides moral grounding as Edgar, portraying him as surprisingly progressive and a credible threat rather than a milquetoast sap.

The Problem with On-Screen Chemistry

Conversely, the relationship between Robbie and Elordi reads as posed rather than possessed. Without magnetic intensity, the tragedy loses urgency, making audiences observe rather than feel. Their romance appears more photogenic than deeply moving, with characters lacking proper dynamics that make emotional moments difficult to believe.

What Works and What Doesn't

The Film's Bold Esthetic Choices

Fennell's pictorial talents mesh remarkably well with the twisted emotions of Brontë's novel. The fever-dream ambience succeeds through lingering shots, sweeping pans across Yorkshire moors, and cinematic chiaroscuro lighting. Opening with young Cathy cheering at a public hanging seeds her submerged sadism brilliantly. Similarly, these striking images feel primed for social media virality rather than serving narrative depth.

Lack of Character Depth and Development

Removing Hindley from the story reduces the scale of wrong done to Heathcliff, eliminating key character motivation. Without the second generation of characters, we lose that sense of a cycle of violence. The film overwrites some of the children's existence entirely, allowing audiences to ignore that Heathcliff persecutes the innocent. Heathcliff's monstrousness comes from somewhere within rather than great social injustice.

Sexuality Without Substance

This version is the horniest Wuthering yet, but for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, it generates sparks of passion without deeper romantic inevitability. The explicit sexuality feels oddly toothless, trading Gothic for vaudeville. Despite multiple images of fingers inserted into mouths, it shies away from more unsettling taboos like incest, animal abuse, and necrophilia. The film is tethered and tamed to please mainstream audiences.

Treatment of Female Characters

Isabella becomes a willing BDSM participant, chained and treated like a dog. This reframing mirrors the rough sex defense, placing onus on the victim. She's reduced to a narrative tool for Heathcliff rather than developing in her own right. In Brontë's novel, Isabella escapes after recognizing the abuse, choosing survival.

Missing Thematic Elements

The film strips away politics of class struggle, racism, and intergenerational trauma. Ending on Catherine's death erases consequences of their manipulations.

How This Version Compares to Past Adaptations

The Race and Casting Debate

Brontë described Heathcliff as a "dark-skinned gipsy" and "Lascar" (a term for South Asian sailors), making his racial identity deliberately ambiguous. Fennell's choice of white Australian actor Jacob Elordi sparked immediate backlash, with critics arguing this whitewashed a character whose otherness drives the narrative. Past adaptations starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, and Timothy Dalton followed similar patterns.

Fennell defended her decision by stating Elordi "looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read". She focused on "the kind of sado-masochistic elements" rather than racial themes. The controversy drove significant interest, with U.S. sales of Brontë's novel more than doubling to 180,000 print copies in 2025, while UK sales jumped 469% in January 2026 compared to the previous year.

Andrea Arnold's 2011 Version

Arnold's adaptation cast James Howson as the first Black Heathcliff in a major English-language film. Shot from Heathcliff's perspective with minimal dialog, Arnold stripped away literary polish to create what felt like "pre-literary reality". Her version emphasized bareness, wildness, and Heathcliff's misery through handheld camerawork.

Gone with the Wind Influences

The official poster directly homages Gone with the Wind, showing Heathcliff cradling Cathy's head. This reference raised eyebrows given the films' vastly different themes.

Conclusion

Fennell's Wuthering Heights delivers a visually stunning experience with memorable supporting performances, especially from Oliver and Chau. On balance, the maximalist esthetic succeeds in capturing the feverish intensity of teenage obsession with Brontë's novel. The lack of chemistry between Robbie and Elordi ultimately undermines the central romance, albeit the film remains an interesting experiment. This adaptation works best as a mood piece rather than a faithful rendering of the source material's darker themes and social commentary.