Cathy and Heathcliff deserve each other

Two insufferable children become insufferable adults and torment everyone around them as a consequence of their own poor choices and lack of agency. The “greatest love story ever told” is overshadowed by abuse, classism, racism, and an unintelligible servant named Joseph1.

Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film “Wuthering Heights” (note the quotations)2 should have been a film by any other name. It should have been the 50 Shades of Grey to its Twilight3. What we saw on film was less an adaptation and more a liberally horny interpretation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 book I’m convinced Fennell barely read. Where the film honors the book, is that it is still a story about three children of no blood relation nor healthy financial or emotional relationship with their respective fathers who, due to social (im)mobility constraints and their inability to appropriately express their jealousy and self-hatred, rot from the inside out.

The film strays from the book by omitting the second half of the story entirely and keeping its main character alive longer than the original narrative would’ve ever allowed. The larger list of characters, notable for its lack of naming variety, are nowhere to be found — much like the story beats that took my reading experience from feeling like I was listening to 1800s chisme to feeling like I was watching a telenovela.

There’s kidnapping! Grave digging! Ghosts! Consanguineous marriage!4

There was a lost opportunity for Fennell to use the medium to express a clear opinion about marital abuse, classism, or racism. Instead, she chose to white-wash5 it and focus on a will-they-won’t-they romance trope. I could forgive these choices if I knew the omissions were a tool to modernize the film and spare us from watching abuse on screen but what we ultimately got was fan fiction. I don’t think the film has anything meaningful to say but I’m not ready to count out Fennell as a filmmaker just yet.

While an abysmal book adaptation, I find “Wuthering Heights”, and Fennell’s skillset specifically, to be quite important for the future of women in filmmaking. She may be providing the blueprint for what the female gaze should look and feel like in popular media. Through visual metaphor and sound alone, she captured the desperation of desire. It’s 5-alarm spicy for the girls that get it — and gringo spicy for the girls that don’t.

Fennell’s film is gorgeous in every meaningful way and suffers because of its association with the book. I would have much preferred a timeline where the themes of the film would have been noticed by book lovers and generally curious folk alike so that a whole new generation of readers could discover Brontë’s work without the comparisons of the two formats. Had this film been marketed simply as “inspired by” WH — or not mentioned it at all — we may be having more discourse about the impeccable set design, costuming, scoring, editing, acting, or cinematography. My god! The cinematography paired with the eerie score by Charli XCX took my breath away. The time and effort put into aesthetic and evocation of the depth of yearning were secondary to the hot takes by book loyalists (myself included at times).

Where she succeeded is capturing how horrible, terrible, and no good Heathcliff and Cathy really are. Not a single page or scene was I rooting for these characters.

But I’m rooting for women behind the camera, so for the love of cinema please go to the theater!

Enjoy this playlist of 2026 Academy Award-nominated scores in addition to a few compositions from films I’ve seen this year so far.

APPLE PLAYLIST | YOUTUBE PLAYLIST