Wuthering Heights

Grade: C

I hadn’t set my eyes on one word on one page, nor a single frame of any previous incarnation of Wuthering Heights. This 2026 adaptation wasn’t a situation that left me wondering what I’d been missing. I hear that director Emerald Fennell took some liberties with Emily Brontë’s source material. However fast and loose she may have played with it, the result still didn’t work for me. It’s droll, plodding, and I cared for it not one whit.

The talent behind and in front of the camera drew me to it. Writer/director Fennell came bursting out of the gate with an Oscar win for the screenplay of Promising Young Woman, her first feature film as a director. Then, in 2023, her follow-up – Saltburn – got shut out at the Oscars, but made my top ten list.

The title refers to a Gothic estate bearing that name. The alcoholic Mr. Earnshaw resides there with his daughter Catherine – and Nelly, an adopted sister of sorts. They get another honorary sibling when a boy is rescued from the Liverpool streets. Catherine names him Heathcliff. My favorite performance in the movie comes in these early scenes. Charlotte Mellington has piercing blue eyes, great expressions, wonderful acting instincts, and makes one hell of a film debut as young Cathy. This appears to be her first credit ever.

The majority of the film takes place several years later, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi playing the older versions of Cathy and Heathcliff. They grew up as sister and brother, but they’re not biologically related. That’s lucky, because they develop feelings for each other as adults. It’s a long story, as I bet you know, but it also involves Cathy’s marriage to a well-to-do neighbor, Heathcliff’s jealousy as he watches from the sidelines, and the structural decline of Wuthering Heights itself.

More than ever before, I thought of Stanley Kubrick as I watched the product of Emerald Fennell’s direction. It’s a solemn period drama with an abundance of white and grey in the cinematography. The electric organ in the score has lots of sinister minor chords. Robbie, Hong Chau, Elordi, and especially Alison Oliver (the latter two are working with Fennell a second time after Saltburn) do fine enough work. The whole thing is just too in the doldrums for my liking.

I didn’t feel a thing when what happens at the end happens. I’m being circumspect in case it’s too soon to spoil a 179 year old story. I still love Fennell, and will eagerly join the line for her next project, with the hope that it’s an original work next time. I’m 44. If I wanted to read Wuthering Heights, I would have by now.

Grade: C