Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Fails to Reach the Same Heights as Original

On Feb 13, 2026, Emerald Fennell released her adaptation of Emily Brönte’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. The film so far has received a 6.3 out of 10 on IMDb and 59 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Although the ratings might make it seem like another unremarkable adaptation, Fennell’s version has garnered a lot of controversy upon its announcement and release. It almost seems as if Fennell has completely ignored the ideas of the original to create her own new star-crossed fantasy under the false name of Brönte’s novel about race and class in 19th-century England.

One of the biggest issues with the film, and arguably the most problematic, is the casting of the characters and how Fennell handled Brönte’s nuanced ideas of race. Heathcliff in the novel is never given an explicitly specified race, but it seems to be implied that he is South Asian or Romani. Heathcliff’s race is the root of the abuse and mistreatment that he suffers in the first half of the novel; he is an outsider to all of the other white, English characters, and he is treated as such, which also explains why Catherine cannot marry him. Despite this, Fennell instead chose to cast white Jacob Elordi in this role, and when questioned about her choice, she responded, "You can only ever make the movie you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” ignoring the large racial aspect of the novel so she could instead make the movie that she wanted to see. 

It seems like another questionable decision on her part to not only cast a white man as Heathcliff but then cast Pakistani Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton and Vietnamese Hong Chau as Nelly Dean and then make them into the antagonistic characters working to keep the white couple of Margot Robbie’s Catherine and Elordi’s Heathcliff apart. Fennell seems to try and hastily justify her casting of Chau as the jealous Nelly by making her the bastard daughter of a lord and a sort of lady-in-waiting to Catherine instead of a servant; if she has some status, it is not strange to cast the only woman of color into the role of the servant. The casting of Edgar also further loses the elements of otherness and class. In the novel the Lintons are very wealthy and are described as having blond hair and blue eyes to contrast the lower-class Catherine, who has dark hair and eyes, along with not-white Heathcliff. Fennell makes an attempt to alter power dynamics so there is more sympathy for Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance.

A common fault of Wuthering Heights adaptations that Fennell’s also falls into is ignoring the second half of the novel to focus solely on Catherine and Heathcliff’s story, not the story of their children. Despite Catherine dying at the end of the first act of the novel, the stories of Heathcliff and all of the others continue to the end of the novel, and there is no real sense of closure or ending if this second half is ignored. In a novel about cycles of abuse, it is important to be able to see the cycles repeat themselves, and without the second generation and especially with Fennell’s decision to cut Hindley and therefore his son Hareton, we only see the start to the cycle. Heathcliff is only really portrayed as a victim and never really as the abuser that he becomes because of his own suffering. The closest the film gets to showing Heathcliff as the villain and antagonist he is, is his relationship with Alison Oliver’s Isabella Linton, although Fennell makes the violently misogynistic choice to turn what was an abusive relationship between Isabella and Heathcliff into a played-for-laughs, BDSM-type relationship where Isabella seems to relish in the pain Heathcliff causes her. 

Although Fennell seems to largely misunderstand any point Brönte was trying to make in her novel, there is a slight saving grace to the film: it is undeniably gorgeous. Fennell embraces historical inaccuracy, exaggeration, and absurdism in all of the costumes and set designs, and she uses her skills in cinematography to create something that is visually wonderful. Unfortunately, it is dragged down by the bad writing, causing the visuals to oftentimes seem at odds with what the characters are saying, and despite the fantastical surroundings, there is no use of the supernatural as there was in the novel, which seems like a waste with her chosen aesthetic. The semi-modern, semi-historical combination is held up by the mixed score and soundtrack, done by Anthony Willis and Charli XCX, which are both beautifully atmospheric but sometimes seem jarringly out of place when the more modern Charli XCX songs are used in more historical visual moments, lacking parallelism.

It seems difficult to classify Fennell’s Wuthering Heights as a good adaptation of its source material when it refuses to address the themes of the original and instead wants to focus on isolating and emphasizing the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff as if that is the whole content of the novel. If the film had been made and marketed as a Wuthering Heights-inspired story instead of an adaptation, it probably would have been received much better, and it would have lacked a lot of the elements that make it problematic. Unfortunately, if Fennell wanted to give her work an amount of status by using an already established literary classic as a base, it seems that it has done her more harm than good.