“Wuthering Heights” is for the teenage fangirl in all of us

Emerald Fennell's (very loose) adaptation is messy and memorable

Feb 09, 2026

Welcome to Girl Culture, the newsletter where Caroline Siede examines pop culture, feminism, and more. This review is free but to get the full Girl Culture experience (including my brand new rom-com column!), you can become a paid subscriber.

Between Promising Young Woman, Saltburn, and her buzzy new adaptation of Wuthering Heights (sorry, “Wuthering Heights”), Emerald Fennell has vaulted herself into one of the most divisive directors working today. She’s the sort of filmmaker everyone feels compelled to have a “take” on—are her films incendiary feminist statements or flashy style over hollow substance? But mine didn’t settle until my family’s Christmas Eve party in 2023. That’s when my 17-year-old burgeoning cinephile cousin revealed that she and her friends were dressing up in elaborate costumes for a Saltburn viewing party, and suddenly everything about Fennell immediately made sense to me.

She’s a director who makes provocative films for teenage girls—a sort of female counterweight to directors like Quentin Tarantino who do the same for teenage boys. And while she’s certainly not the first or only director to do that, the marketing machine behind her gives her films a level of mainstream visibility that other elements of “girl culture” sometimes lack. Almost irrespective of the quality of her films (which I think range from good to okay), I’m glad she exists. She’s filling a niche that hasn’t quite been filled in this way before and that alone feels impactful.

All of which was on my mind during my press screening of “Wuthering Heights” because more than anything—and I promise I don’t mean this as an insult—it feels like a film based on Wuthering Heights fanfic written by a really obsessive, creative teenage girl. This isn’t so much an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel as it is a riff on some of its themes and storylines, all wrapped up and reimagined in a shiny, sexy, supremely unsubtle package.

And as with so much of Fennell’s work, I’m happy it’s out there even if I’m not sure it’s entirely for me. After all, our future cinephiles have to start somewhere and if this is the film that opens a generation’s eyes to the idea that movies can do provocative, stylized stuff like this, I think that’s a net good. Perhaps not quite as good as me falling for movies like Velvet Goldmine, American Psycho, and Y tu mamá también in my own teenage years. But, hey, maybe that’s just my own former teen girl bias talking.

The most impressive thing about “Wuthering Heights” is how much it succeeds at creating a vibe. That is perhaps Fennell’s greatest gift as a filmmaker and watching other directors try to knock off her style the past few years has taught me to appreciate the aesthetic confidence of her work. Her colorful, theatrical, Charlie XCX-scored take on the moors of 18th century England has a clear tonal and visual point of view. And, for the first half of the movie at least, it has an emotional one too.

“We are all ill because of you!” Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) screams at her abusive, alcoholic father (Martin Clunes). The fact that he’s a landed man with an important family name means he can essentially do whatever he wants within the confines of his large, crumbling Wuthering Heights estate. And what he chooses to do is live in almost-squalor with a small staff of servants he treats like shit and three children he lords power over; a prison no one can escape because his patriarchal word is law and there’s no one nearby to challenge him anyway. Wuthering Heights might as well be an island.

That gives young Cathy (a fantastically petulant Charlotte Mellington), her servant-companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen), and her father’s newly adopted ward Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) an intense trauma bond. Though none adopt the overt cruelty of Mr. Earnshaw, they’re each in some way feral for the love and affection they’re denied by the father figure in their life. And that manifests in an intense, often psychosexual devotion to one another—particularly as Nelly ages into Hong Chau and Heathcliff into Jacob Elordi.

There’s real juice to the first half of the film, as Robbie gives Cathy a delightful sense of immature narcissism while Elordi channels a sort of Cary-Elwes-in-The-Princess-Bride farm boy decency with a touch of Harlequin novel angst. Their obvious longing for one another is circumstantial, destructive, and perhaps even a little incestuous, and yet their chemistry is strong enough that you can’t help but root for them to make out too.

While the film’s sumptuously ahistorical costumes and maximalist cinematography are striking, it’s the small physical gestures that stuck with me most. A hand grasping an ankle; Heathcliff using his giant palms to shield Cathy’s face from the rain; an unintentionally intimate moment in a barnyard loft. Fennell conjures a powerful sense of yearning as Cathy tries to deny her obvious feelings for Heathcliff while making a more pragmatic match with her rich new neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). For his part, Heathcliff has a clearer understanding that he and Cathy belong to one another, but he’s also keenly aware that the dictates of class stratification mean he has to wait for her to come to him, he can’t aim above his station.

It’s effective set-up, the trouble comes when it’s time for this story to, uh, climax. Where previous Wuthering Heights film adaptations have kept the longing purely emotional, Fennell takes Cathy and Heathcliff’s dynamic to more overtly carnal places at times—a choice that results in scenes that are successfully steamy but also a bit disappointingly generic in their sensuality. Though lust can be an incredibly powerful way to build character, here Fennell seems more focused on recreating romance novel tropes than revealing the true inner desires of her protagonists. The longing is more compelling than the craving fulfilled.

That’s a problem for Elordi in particular. Once Heathcliff disappears and re-enters the story as a more conventionally dashing romantic hero, Elordi falls back on one of his weaknesses as an actor—namely the sense that he’s so hyperfocused on how he comes across on camera he’s not actually living in the moment. Once the early sweetness of farm boy Heathcliff is swept away, Elordi does a lot of posing and mugging, but little to capture the madness, anger, and pain bubbling beneath Heathcliff’s new suave exterior. (Too bad because I thought Fennell brought out his best performance to date in Saltburn.)

And while Robbie does a better job giving Cathy a sense of consistency even as her circumstances change, the film struggles to maintain its thematic cohesion as the story gets bigger but not particularly better. Extended scenes in the Linton family home seem to exist mostly because the production design is so impressive, Fennell feels compelled to show it off from every angle. But it’s less clear what ideas the film is trying to explore once it leaves the walls of Wuthering Heights behind. It’s not inherently a problem that Fennell’s adaptation trims, combines, and excises huge swaths of the novel (including an entire generation of characters), but it is a problem that the film feels like it’s missing an emotional driver in its second half. What starts redhot becomes a bit too cool to the touch, even as Cathy and Heathcliff’s sexual mania ratchets up.

And yet, even with those flaws, “Wuthering Heights” is never short of a memorable cinematic experience—which is not nothing in an age where period piece romances can feel a bit disposable. As with a lot of Fennell’s work, “Wuthering Heights” will play best for those willing to forget the films they’ve seen that have done this kind of thing better and give themselves over to the feeling of a first transgressive teenage obsession. That’s certainly the sensation she’s trying to evoke. And when she succeeds, her take on Wuthering Heights is darkly romantic and genuinely electric.

Grade: B-