“Wuthering Heights”: What the Hell Did I Just Watch?!
Content note: this blog post, and the film, are appropriate for age 18+. This post discusses racism, sex, abuse, objectification, and execution. Spoilers for the novel and 2026 film Wuthering Heights.
The 2026 film “Wuthering Heights” attempts to eroticize and fetishize violence: abuse and even execution. Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights is about the toxic, all-consuming, and destructive relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It’s not a romance, at least as we define romance today. Another huge issue is the whitewashing of Heathcliff, as many people have noted. Heathcliff is a person of color in the book and repeatedly described as Romani. The new movie changes Heathcliff’s ethnicity and thus elides any references to race or racism.
I didn’t like Emerald Fennell’s movie Promising Young Woman and didn’t watch Saltburn. So, maybe Fennell’s 2026 movie “Wuthering Heights” just isn’t for me. The film is campy, with beautiful people and scenery and anachronistic dialogue and costumes. The setting is idealized, unlike in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film adaptation of Brontë’s novel, where the Yorkshire Moors are beautiful but dreary, isolated, and dangerous. I was irritated when I approached the 2026 movie as an adaptation of the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I still didn’t like it, but it annoyed me less when I considered it inspired by Wuthering Heights — maybe even an erotic fanfiction of it.
Casting Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff presents other complications. They’re both much older than their characters, who are 18 or 19 when Cathy dies in childbirth in the novel. This also makes them seem much crueler, more manipulative, and less impulsive than the book’s teenage main characters. However, I agree with Cinzia DuBois (Lady of the Library on YouTube) that casting older actors is the right choice here because the 2026 film contains sex scenes. DuBois liked the movie while still acknowledging its controversies and flaws. She called the film over-the-top, absurdist, and postmodernist but enjoyable. She also said it’s not an adaptation at all. It’s vaguely “inspired by” Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I agree with this. I think the film completely falls apart if you try to analyze it as an adaptation, even a very loose one. The film is its own thing — Wuthering Heights vibes, basically.
As my fellow Rioters Jeff and Rebecca said in a recent Book Riot podcast episode: “Wuthering Heights is Not a Romance.” They mention that it has characteristics of the Romantic literary movement, which is not how we define the word “romantic” today. These book quotes from Cathy are often considered “romantic” today: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” And “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Rebecca says these quotes are examples of enmeshment, not romantic love. Cathy has no boundaries with Heathcliff. Indeed, her sense of self is inextricable from her codependent relationship with him.
The 2026 film tries to make the story not only a romance but specifically erotic. If you’ve read a lot of Victorian novels, then you know that they don’t even describe kissing — let alone sex. Even when marriage and courtship are integral to novels’ plots, the characters discuss intimacy in ways that seem circumspect and implicit to us today.
I recently saw an ad on TV for this movie that said, “Not a dry seat in the house.” This is a pun on the cliché “not a dry eye in the house” (it made everyone cry). Presumably, that means this movie made everyone in the audience sexually aroused. In other words, it’s being marketed as porn, because erotic arousal is the function of porn. This is a joke, but it’s also a clever way to manage audience expectations. By this point (May 2026), there’s been so much discourse about this movie, the advertising is upfront about the movie’s raunchy tone. It’s clearly for an adult audience only.
It makes sense to make Cathy and Heathcliff’s tumultuous passion steamy for modern film audiences, but some of the adult content is gratuitous. The film opens by objectifying a hanged man with an erection. The audio comes in before the visual, so it initially sounds like someone having sex, panting on a creaky bed. I’m uncomfortable with a film objectifying a hanged man and sexualizing his involuntary, physiological responses as he’s dying. This man is not a named character with a personality. He has nothing to do with the book whatsoever and is in the movie for shock value.
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Fennell intended the film to depict her own impression of first reading the novel at age 14, but I think a voice-over or frame narrative would have been necessary to convey this clearly. Explaining artistic intention in an interview isn’t sufficient. There are huge, missed opportunities for framing devices or metafiction in this film. After all, the novel Wuthering Heights uses framing narratives repeatedly. Instead of a true adaptation or a metafictional film about the experience of reading and interpreting fiction, we get camp, sometimes played seriously.
As other people have said, casting Elordi as Heathcliff was erasure of Heathcliff’s identity as a person of color. It also doesn’t work. It fundamentally alters the story, characters, and relationships. In the novel, a servant refers to young Heathcliff as “it,” looks for his “owner,” and calls his first language “gibberish.” In the 2026 movie, the servants still dehumanize Heathcliff as “it” and “thing,” but the crucial context of the book is missing. White book characters abuse Heathcliff specifically because of racism.
Violet Cannon, a Romani blogger from the UK, wrote that Heathcliff is explicitly Romani in the novel. The g-slur is often used to refer to him. Nelly says to Heathcliff in the novel: “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?”
Here, Nelly speculates on his family origins and ethnicity. She’s making up a story about him, which is biased by her own stereotypes of people she’s never met and countries she’s never visited. Cannon wrote that passages like this reflect the white characters’ confusion about Heathcliff’s ethnicity, rather than making his identity racially ambiguous to us. Racist white characters consider him a racial Other. It makes absolutely no sense for the film to reimagine Heathcliff (Elordi) as white and Nelly (Hong Chau) as East Asian.
The 2026 film also mischaracterizes Heathcliff’s wife, Isabella. I often thought it was mocking her, playing her naiveté and Heathcliff’s abuse for laughs. When Cathy first notices Isabella’s attraction to Heathcliff, Cathy says something very anachronistic, like, “He’d eat you alive!” Isabella is inexperienced, and there is a big power imbalance.
Disturbingly, the film seemingly conflates abuse and kink at times. Isabella is portrayed as liking and consenting to Heathcliff’s abuse. This shouldn’t need to be spelled out, but a consensual BDSM relationship is impossible in an era or society where women can’t vote, divorce easily, or have separate bank accounts. In the movie, Isabella doesn’t enjoy Heathcliff’s humiliating, violent treatment of her and is overwhelmed by it, but she endures it because she loves him and finds him attractive. This is a textbook example of an abusive relationship, not BDSM. In the film, only Nelly seems to understand that Isabella is being abused.
Bella Blue Bloss wrote on Substack: “If Emerald had accurately portrayed Heathcliff and Isabella’s relationship, she would not be able to sell her film as ‘the greatest love story of all time.’ If Isabella likes what he is doing to her, then Heathcliff can remain the desirable, obsessive bad boy, and the viewer can still swoon and gush over him without being morally challenged. The objectification and fetishisation of Isabella was a purposeful choice to bolster Heathcliff, to shove aside the reality of what Isabella endures and make her compliant in the domestic abuse.”
This is precisely why Wuthering Heights is not a love story. The movie tries to have everything both ways with Heathcliff: an alluring lover and an abuser at the same time. I understand why many modern adaptations and retellings try to give female characters more agency than they have in the original, classic texts. However, something has gone terribly wrong when the same character has much more agency in the original novel than in the 2026 film.
The Book Riot podcast episode is right that Wuthering Heights doesn’t have a clear, political or moral point, and that’s part of what makes it an enduring, rewarding novel to read and analyze. However, this moral ambiguity is completely different from the film trivializing abuse.
The 2026 movie ends about halfway through the novel, right after Cathy dies. This is typical of film versions of Wuthering Heights, but everything else about it is different from conventional adaptations. The quotation marks in the title signal irony or that this is not quite an adaptation, but they’re too subtle. Some people think they’re merely a stylistic choice, not an indicator of the film’s tone. Yet changing the title or characters’ names even slightly would bring it into the realm of parody. The film is ambitious and polarizing, but in her screenplay, Fennell wrote Brontë’s story into a corner. Unlike the book’s, the film’s complexities are incoherent. Kate Bush’s song “Wuthering Heights” encapsulates the novel much better.
