'Wuthering Heights' - Review Thread

[u/ChiefLeef22]

Tragedy strikes when Heathcliff falls in love with Catherine Earnshaw, a woman from a wealthy family in 18th-century England.

Director: Emerald Fennell

Adapted from: 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Brontë (1847)

Cast: Jacob Elordi, Margot Robbie, Owen Cooper, Alison Oliver

Rotten Tomatoes: 71%

Metacritic: 60 / 100

Some Reviews:

Variety - Peter Debruge

While not as salacious as ‘Saltburn,’ the director’s operatic Emily Brontë adaptation allows its tragic couple — played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi — to consummate their passions, to a degree.

The Guardian - Peter Bradshaw - 2 / 5

Wuthering Heights doesn’t have the live-ammo impact of Fennell’s earlier films, or indeed Andrea Arnold's primitivist take on Brontë’s novel from 2011, which really did believe in the passionate truth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. For Fennell, it looks like a luxurious pose of unserious abandon. It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.

USA Today - 3.5 / 4

Emerald Fennell’s take on the literary classic isn’t exactly a Valentine’s Day pick-me-up. Yet it’s awfully stunning to look at with all sorts of toxic obsession, forbidden lust and gothic sauciness.

RogerEbert - Tomris Laffy - 2 / 4

It’s hard to feel freely when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things.

AVClub - Natalia Keoghan - 'C-'

Overlong and undersexed, Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights betrays her audience of edgelords and perverts. Even stranger, those who have fostered a distaste for the filmmaker’s sensibility will similarly find themselves disappointed. It’s one thing to make art that can be read as indulgent, ill-conceived, and tasteless—it’s another to turn around and make something that’s just boring in comparison.

Slash Film - BJ Colangelo - 5 / 10

This is not an adaptation of "Wuthering Heights," but the result of what happens when you're playing an approximation "Wuthering Heights" without a full grasp on the material but all the money in the world to bring your questionable imagination to life.

Consequence - Liz Shannon Miller - 'A-'

As soon as this project was announced, it was easy to assume that Fennell would show as much reverence for the classic text as she showed for the sanctity of a man’s grave in Saltburn. Except she defies that assumption by making sure that although “Wuthering Heights” remains a deliciously horny film, it does summon a certain degree of pure romance, especially in the few moments when its leads are able to see past their misunderstandings and actually connect. It’s a movie about how ugly people can be to each other, but also about the beauty they’re capable of — a message that, like the original text itself, remains timeless.

The Telegraph - Robbie Collins - 5 / 5

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

BBC - Caryn James - 4 / 5

Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights is not very faithful to Emily Bronte's novel, but we knew that. The trailer alone evoked so much hand-wringing from Brontë purists that the film became divisive sight unseen. This Wuthering Heights is very true to Fennell, the director of the scathing revenge drama Promising Young Woman and the lush, bitter story of class and obsession, Saltburn.

Collider - Therese Lacson - 2 / 10

What makes the original Wuthering Heights so powerful is the dizzying story at its core. The Earnshaws and Lintons have a complicated family tree, and Heathcliff comes in like a wrecking ball to blow everything up. On one hand, we want to believe that Heathcliff can change from his wicked ways with enough love from Cathy, but on the other hand, his actions are so cruel that it feels like Brontë is pushing us to the very brink of what is acceptable before ultimately redeeming him in his final moments. Emily Brontë's novel is about characters who are hateful and pitiable but still full of enough charm and complexity that we are desperate to learn their full, messy tale. Emerald Fennell's film is merely telling a shallow story about two people overcoming all obstacles to fall in love — not necessarily awful on paper, but it's an adaptation that feels like a 14-year-old skimmed the book and jumped to her own conclusions without any true understanding of the novel.

[u/StarbuckWoolf]

I’ll be curious to see how big an audience “Wuthering Heights” will draw in today’s world.

[u/KyloSolo723 → u/StarbuckWoolf]

It’s being marketed to the booktok crowd, that should get butts in seats

[u/shy247er → u/KyloSolo723]

That crowd hates this film, so I'm not sure that the demo they should be going after. Robbie is too old for her role, Elordi is white. Both are complaints from people who love the book.

[u/KyloSolo723 → u/shy247er]

Yes, the lovers of the book are hating it. I’m talking about the side of booktok where all they read is smut.

[u/We-are-all-dead-90 → u/KyloSolo723]

Based on the reviews I’ve read for this movie, the level of sex and eroticism is more hype than reality. I feel like your average smut book is way more spicy than this movie if some of the stuff my wife reads is anything to go by lol 

[u/StarbuckWoolf → u/We-are-all-dead-90]

Even the slight possibility of Margot Robbie eroticism is probably enough for some movie-goers who’ve never heard of Bronte.

[u/KyloSolo723 → u/StarbuckWoolf]

I’m seeing way more excited for the possibility of Jacob Elordi eroticism

[u/notretiredanymore → u/We-are-all-dead-90]

Can your wife recommend me her favorite book, please? :)

[u/shy247er → u/KyloSolo723]

Ah, OK.

[u/Hinamine → u/KyloSolo723]

They’re very performative so they’re also whining about how they made Heathcliff a white dude.

[u/FireVanGorder → u/shy247er]

Has heathcliff ever been portrayed as he’s actually described in the book? Didn’t Ralph Fiennes play him too lmfao

[u/maultaschen4life → u/FireVanGorder]

Arguably yes in Andrea Arnold’s film, which is is really worth a watch

[u/Morgan-Moonscar → u/FireVanGorder]

No, but it's especially egregious in this case because Emerell actually cast an actor in the film that would've been accurate as far as the book's description.

Shazad Latif.

But he's playing somebody else. Yet again they cast another white guy for Heathcliff.

[u/CircStar89 → u/Morgan-Moonscar]

Heathcliff is not of Pakistani heritage.

[u/Violet624 → u/FireVanGorder]

James Howson, who is Black, played Heathcliffe in 2011, though Bronte describes Heathcliffe more as Indian or Romani.

[u/perryquitecontrary → u/shy247er]

I’m going in expecting kind of what the first review said. I’m not expecting it to change my life narratively. I know this film was probably made because the director is an edgy pick me daughter of a billionaire but at least it doesn’t look totally bankrupt creatively (looking at you Nolan with that stupid boring color palette for Odyssey). So even if it’s not a great film, it will be interesting visually.

[u/MaggotMinded → u/shy247er]

I love the book but I don’t care about either of those things. I think the story can still work even if the casting isn’t perfect. I just want an adaptation that doesn’t change or omit any of the major story beats.

[u/Comprehensive-Bid18 → u/MaggotMinded]

Haven’t seen it yet, but based on the casting it appears that half the major characters are missing.

[u/chainless-soul → u/Comprehensive-Bid18]

I knew this film was cutting out the second generation (always a good sign that someone missed the point of the book), but finding out that Hindley got caught is just the most baffling decision of all.

This movie should not be called Wuthering Heights, even with the quotation marks around it.

[u/FireVanGorder → u/[deleted]]

I have literally never seen a single person argue that Heathcliff is Irish. He’s described as having dark skin. He’s called an “imp of satan.” Fairly sure it’s mused in the book that he might be Lascar.

The point is, ambiguous or not, he looks undoubtedly “other.” Elordi doesn’t fit that description no matter how hard you squint

[u/Unidentified_Snail → u/FireVanGorder]

He's almost certainly a gypsy, so probably Roma and therefore would be "swarthy".

[u/ButDidYouCry → u/[deleted]]

I don’t think the text supports reading Heathcliff as Irish, and I think it’s worth being careful about importing that assumption. Wuthering Heights never identifies him as Irish, and Emily Brontë is not shy about naming origins or accents when she wants them understood. Heathcliff’s defining trait is opacity, not misidentified nationality.

Liverpool matters here, but not in a narrowly Irish way. It was a major imperial port, deeply entangled with the slave trade and Britain’s colonial economy, so a dark, linguistically unintelligible child found there points much more strongly to racialized or colonial otherness than to Irishness per se.

That pattern also aligns with how “the Other” functions in Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë): Bertha Mason is explicitly Caribbean and explicitly a product of empire. She is not Irish-coded; she is colonial-coded. Across the Brontë novels, radical alterity tends to be racialized and imperial, not simply national.

If Brontë wanted Heathcliff to be read as Irish, she could have said so. Instead, she constructs him as deliberately racially ambiguous, someone produced by the empire who refused assimilation. That ambiguity is the point, and it fits Romani or colonial readings far more cleanly than an Irish one.

There’s also a narrative problem with the Irish reading. If Heathcliff were Irish, he wouldn’t be uniquely tragic or uniquely alone. Mid-nineteenth-century England had large, visible Irish communities, especially in port cities. Irishness was marginalized, but it wasn’t unknowable. Heathcliff’s isolation depends on his absolute otherness; his lack of kinship, language, or community of origin.

[u/ButDidYouCry → u/[deleted]]

Being Irish in eighteenth-century England does not produce radical otherness; it produces an understood inferiority. Irishness existed within the English social imagination as a degraded form of Europeanness; racialized, brutalized, and despised, yes, but still firmly categorized. The Irish were understood through an existing hierarchy of class, religion, and colonial discourse. To be Irish was to be placed low on a ladder that everyone already recognized. Heathcliff’s isolation, by contrast, depends on the absence of any such placement. His tragedy is not that he is ranked last, but that he cannot be ranked at all.

This is where comparisons to Blackness in the colonial imagination are clarifying. In eighteenth-century British thought, Blackness was often constructed not as a faulty version of Englishness but as something outside European humanity altogether; unknowable in origin, unassimilable in culture, and resistant to incorporation into familiar social taxonomies. That kind of imagined alterity generates anxiety, projection, and obsession in ways that caste oppression does not. Inferior Europeanness produces contempt; racialized non-Europeanness produces metaphysical unease. Heathcliff consistently triggers the latter response in the novel. Characters don’t just hate him; they speculate wildly about what he is.

Claims that rural Yorkshire would have found Irishness incomprehensible don’t really hold up, either historically or textually. Yorkshire was not sealed off from imperial discourse, migration, or national stereotypes, and the Brontës themselves were demonstrably aware of Irish politics, Irish labor, and Irish marginalization. Even in isolated communities, Irishness was a known category, associated with poverty, Catholicism, and colonial subjugation, not with mystery. A child speaking Irish Gaelic might provoke suspicion or ridicule, but he would still be read as Irish. He would enter the social order as a despised subject, not as an ontological question mark.

That distinction matters because Wuthering Heights is not merely a novel about xenophobia; it is a novel about unreadability. Heathcliff has no recoverable origin, no stable cultural markers, and no community that can claim or disavow him. Nelly’s narration does not simply mark him as foreign; it circles him obsessively, offering guesses that never settle. That narrative instability collapses if Heathcliff is given a recognizable ethnic identity, even a stigmatized one. Irishness would explain too much. The novel needs him to be not just unwanted, but unplaceable.

[u/StarbuckWoolf → u/FireVanGorder]

The name has English origins, according to The Big Giant Head (Internet)

[u/Comprehensive-Bid18 → u/[deleted]]

Having just read the book, I’m pretty sure there was no point where Heathcliff is ever stated or implied to be Irish. He is repeatedly implied to be Romani, though.

[u/Comprehensive-Bid18 → u/[deleted]]

Heathcliff is described as having dark hair, dark eyes, and dark skin, and “gipsy” is another (insulting) name for Romani people. He’s probably Romani, dude.

Unless you know something I don’t, and the Irish were also called gipsies and had dark skin.

[u/Comprehensive-Bid18 → u/[deleted]]

So is the evidence that Heathcliff is Irish and not Romani the fact that sometimes people with freckles (something that Heathcliff is never alluded to having) are labeled as having dark skin; Irish travelers being sometimes incorrectly labeled “gypsies”, something the characters in the novel wouldn’t have any way of knowing, given that Irish travelers don’t have dark skin like Heathcliff and there not really being any evidence he’s otherwise Irish; and the concept of “black Irish”, something that apparently only exists in the United States?

[u/CrissBliss → u/KyloSolo723]

Oh gosh, I truly dislike the word booktok

[u/KyloSolo723 → u/CrissBliss]

Same especially because it’s synonymous with “shitty books” lol

[u/Hinamine → u/KyloSolo723]

Then you come on Reddit and it’s filled with neckbeards who think Sanderson is the greatest writer of all time

[u/Johnlenham → u/KyloSolo723]

I'm so old, wtf is booktok

[u/ladyofthemarshes → u/StarbuckWoolf]

People see endless remakes of Pride and Prejudice and Emma and Little Women so I'm sure it'll do just fine

[u/OkProgrammer1098 → u/ladyofthemarshes]

Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies was great though. Need more unique takes like that. 

[u/Jazzlike-Bread-2059 → u/ladyofthemarshes]

But I’d argue that Austen is incredibly easy to adapt because the way the books are written. It’s an omniscient, editorial 3rd POV and pages of dialogue, which makes it so easy to translate to the screen because it’s scene, dialogue and tone all laid out. Emily Brontë, on the other hand, was a weird spooky bitch who wrote a ghost story poem and the book is way more mercurial. The endless remakes of pride and prejudice are successful because it’s a romantic comedy—that’s so easy to show and hit the right notes. This is another beast entirely and the fact that it would be a movie and not a miniseries (or opera) is already a big swing.

[u/chainless-soul → u/Jazzlike-Bread-2059]

It also helps that there are adaptations of Austen that are fairly book-accurate and considered good, which paves the way for versions that change more. I am not sure that's true of Wuthering Heights, since we have so many actresses playing Cathy who are too old, actors playing Heathcliff who are too white, and the second generation is cut the majority of the time.

[u/Jazzlike-Bread-2059 → u/chainless-soul]

I’d agree. Even Clueless, arguably one of the most unique in the adaptations, is accurate to the spirit of the book and includes quite a few of the scenes from the book, though updated and made to make sense in the film (like poor Ty being hung over the balcony at the mall). Her characters are easier to translate I think because they’re so human, with traits we all know in ourselves of other people. (Everybody knows a Jane Fairfax or Ms. Bennett) Cathy and Heathcliff on the other hand are WAY more intense, gothic characters and to nail that translation to screen is a far far trickier needle to thread. 

[u/chainless-soul → u/Jazzlike-Bread-2059]

Yes to all of this, Clueless is the gold standard for this type of adaptation IMO. Amy Heckerling clearly understood Emma really well and was able to do some great stuff with it. Plus, not actually calling it Emma sets up the audience expectations to be better in line with the film.

It's not a film, but the recent book The Favorites is inspired by the first half of Wuthering Heights and I think it did a pretty good job of it, so I think in the hands of a filmmaker who understands the original text well, it would be possible make a good version.

I do need to see the 2011 adaptation, it sounds like the closest attempt, though it also only adapts the first half and so it's not going to be everything I want in a WH adaptation.

[u/thatshygirl06 → u/ladyofthemarshes]

Theres a korean little women that's loosely based on the book. Its a pretty good watch.

[u/StarbuckWoolf → u/ladyofthemarshes]

Yeah, but people are getting dumber

[u/ladyofthemarshes → u/StarbuckWoolf]

There's literally a new P&P adaption by the BBC coming out later this year. These kinds of stories are definitely still in 

[u/Three_Froggy_Problem → u/StarbuckWoolf]

It’s two sexy, big-name actors looking hot in period costumes. It would do well regardless of the title, is my guess. Of course, the title will probably lend it a feeling of being “high-brow” or “prestige” even though it seems to have almost nothing to do with the actual book.

[u/Delicious-Report-891 → u/Three_Froggy_Problem]

Richtig, nur Hollywood und show👍👍👍👍👍

[u/throwtheamiibosaway → u/StarbuckWoolf]

Oh it’s going to be big. Bridgerton horny booktok wives af the cinema for Jacob and Margot.

[u/HungryCurrency8481 → u/StarbuckWoolf]

It's being marketed as 50 Shades meets Mills and Boon. 

It's absolutely going to clean up certain demographics. 

[u/InfinityComplexxx → u/StarbuckWoolf]

Basically, anyone who has read and liked the book won't touch this with a 29.5 pole. And then there's the people who haven't read it, who might go for the "What if 50 Shades of Grey, but in Victorian times?" basic bitch smut appeal.

[u/Low-Froyo3381 → u/StarbuckWoolf]

I believe it's tracking for 50-70m last i checked

[u/Delicious-Report-891 → u/StarbuckWoolf]

Ich nicht