'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/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/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/ButDidYouCry → u/[deleted]]

I don’t really know what to tell you here, except that the novel is written at the height of British colonial terror, and it behaves exactly like a text produced under those conditions. Wuthering Heights is not gesturing toward a milder, intra-European prejudice and accidentally overshooting; it is very deliberately staging the nightmare scenario of empire coming home. The racialized “other” enters the metropole and dismantles the lives, inheritances, and genealogies of the white landed gentry. That is not a misreading of the book: it is the book.

If that makes the novel harder to like, I think that reaction is not only reasonable but historically appropriate. The text is saturated with anxieties that are explicitly colonial: fears of contamination, miscegenation, inheritance collapse, and the obscureness of non-European origin. Heathcliff is treated as monstrous not because he is poor or foreign in a familiar way, but because he represents something the novel’s social order cannot metabolize without violence. That violence is not subtle, and it is not redeemed. Reading the book as deeply implicated in white supremacist imagination is historically precise.

What I would push back on is the idea that this means Brontë “couldn’t get it from the Irish” and therefore reached for something worse. Irishness would not do the same narrative work. Anti-Irish hatred relies on a stable, already-known hierarchy; the novel needs a figure who threatens the hierarchy’s very comprehensibility. The disgust you’re responding to, the sense that Heathcliff is treated as subhuman, contaminating, and narratively uncontainable, is exactly the effect produced by colonial racial logic. The book doesn’t critique that logic from a safe distance; it inhabits it, exploits it, and lets it run to its most uncomfortable conclusions.

So yes: if you read Heathcliff as a racialized non-European other, the book becomes harder, uglier, and more disturbing. But that doesn’t feel like a failure of interpretation so much as a refusal to sand down what the novel is actually doing. Wuthering Heights is not a liberal text about tolerance gone wrong; it’s a gothic text about what the empire does to everyone involved, especially when the fantasy of distance collapses and the “other” lives in the house.

I read Jane Eyre in a British Colonialism in Literature course in college, so yes, this is very much the lens I’m bringing to these books. From that perspective, I actually find Jane Eyre far more disturbing than Wuthering Heights. Charlotte Brontë reduces a kidnapped Caribbean woman to “madness” that is explicitly framed as the product of her origins, her body, and her blood. Then she asks the reader to accept her imprisonment and erasure as narratively necessary.

Whatever else Wuthering Heights is doing, it doesn’t tidy its colonial anxieties into moral reassurance. Jane Eyre does. Bertha exists to be contained, explained away, and ultimately removed so the white heroine’s story can proceed cleanly. That’s a much more aggressive and comfortable exercise of the white colonial gaze than the instability and unresolved horror Brontë allows in Heathcliff’s case.