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- Fennell’s choice: a fantasia that flaunts style over strain
- What Emily Brontë built: love that wounds and world-making cruelty
- How Fennell strips away the novel’s central friction
- Nelly recast: turning a narrator into a scapegoat
- Race, casting, and the politics of visibility
- Scenes of eroticism without ethical weight
- Character swaps and the loss of narrative force
- Echoes of the director’s earlier tendencies
- Where adaptation must earn its existence
Emerald Fennell’s new film billed as a reimagining of Wuthering Heights arrives loud, glossy, and deliberately strange. It promises transgressive pleasures and gothic heat. What it ultimately delivers feels like a stylistic stunt that changes the moral center of Emily Brontë’s story while leaving the core emotional conflict hollow.
Fennell’s choice: a fantasia that flaunts style over strain
Fennell has described her version as a fantasia, not a literal retelling. That artistic framing is fair. But the film treats the label as license to prioritize visual provocation over the novel’s toxic emotional core.
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The production design announces intent at every turn. The movie frequently returns to:
- rooms sheathed in flesh-toned leather and skin-like textures
- costumes of red latex and diaphanous cellophane
- closeups that linger on bodily fluids and wet surfaces
- an opening sequence in which apparent ecstasy reveals itself as a violent collapse
All of this suggests a film keen to be read as kinky, transgressive, and deliberately perverse. Yet those surface choices are rarely matched by the moral or psychological risk the novel demands.
What Emily Brontë built: love that wounds and world-making cruelty
Brontë’s novel is a study in contradiction. It makes its most enthralling figures—Heathcliff and Catherine—also the most destructive. Their love is obsessive. Their actions are brutal.
Key elements that drive Brontë’s tragedy:
- two neglected children bonding on the moors
- a shift in household power when Hindley comes to control Wuthering Heights
- Catherine’s choice to enter genteel society rather than marry Heathcliff
- Heathcliff’s return, wealthy and bent on revenge
- a campaign of degradation toward Hindley, his heir, and anyone in his path
The genius of the book is the way Brontë makes readers feel torn. We are repelled by Heathcliff’s cruelty. We are also held captive by the ferocity of the bond he shares with Catherine. That tension—the love that ruins lives—is the book’s engine.
How Fennell strips away the novel’s central friction
Instead of preserving Brontë’s moral tension, the film smooths it. Catherine and Heathcliff arrive onscreen as attractive, sympathetic lovers. Their flaws are softened into mere pettiness or tragic fate.
The effect is twofold:
- the figures who in the novel are monstrous become victims or romanticized rebels
- the consequences of violence and cruelty are reframed as accidents or misunderstandings
When the perpetrators are sanitized, the narrative loses its combustible charge. A story about people who hurt and are hurt needs protagonists who can be both alluring and awful. Fennell’s version often opts for allure without the awful.
Comparative tones: from feral to polished
- Brontë: characters who sadden, enrage, and fascinate in equal measure.
- Fennell: figures who look ravishing and suffer but rarely behave monstrously.
Nelly recast: turning a narrator into a scapegoat
Brontë frames the novel through nested storytelling. Nelly Dean, a house servant who has long observed the family, relays much of the action. Her presence complicates truth and reliability.
Many readers have questioned Nelly’s biases. Did she tolerate lies that set tragedy in motion? Did she fail to act? Those questions are part of the book’s moral fog.
Fennell takes that ambiguity and makes it a verdict. In the film, the maid is portrayed not just as flawed but as the principal villain. Scenes are added to suggest calculated malice. Actions that might be neglect in the novel are shown as deliberate manipulation on screen.
This choice realigns blame. It reframes Heathcliff and Catherine as largely innocent victims of an envious attendant. The result is a reversal of Brontë’s balance: the monsters become sympathetic, and the one steady witness is condemned.
Race, casting, and the politics of visibility
Fennell’s casting alters racial cues present in the source material. Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity in the novel plays into themes of otherness and exclusion. The film flattens that ambivalence. Meanwhile, the servant is presented in ways that emphasize difference between servant and masters.
These changes shift power dynamics on screen. Where Brontë used social and racial marginality to complicate motive, the film often simplifies identity into a prop for blame.
Scenes of eroticism without ethical weight
The movie revels in fetishized imagery: latex, wet skin, and ritualized sensuality. On first viewing, such choices promise an interrogation of desire and domination.
But the moments that register as transgressive visually are rarely interrogated narratively. When the film shows cruelty or sexual spectacle, it often treats such episodes as aesthetic tableaux rather than moral events with consequences.
The result is a disconnect: intense design choices that suggest danger, paired with characterizations that void the danger of meaning.
Character swaps and the loss of narrative force
Several plot beats are reshaped so that the protagonists behave more like victims from contemporary romance films than the relentless agents in Brontë’s text.
- acts of revenge are toned down or reversed
- abusive behavior becomes consensual transgression
- anger is styled as emotional suffering rather than active harm
Those moves drain the novel’s moral texture. The original’s brutal logic—that intense love can also be devastating cruelty—becomes a melodramatic riddle with no answer.
Echoes of the director’s earlier tendencies
Fennell’s previous work revealed a taste for subversion that often resolves into conservative judgments. That pattern appears here, too.
The film flirts with provocation and then reins it in, privileging beauty and scandal over consistent moral risk. In some sequences, the movie seems to defend its glamorous lovers from scrutiny, even as it invites us to stare.
Where adaptation must earn its existence
An adaptation need not be faithful to the letter of an original. But it must justify its changes. It has to offer a fresh center of gravity.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights makes bold aesthetic choices. It removes the book’s sharpest tension. And in doing so, it fails to replace that tension with anything equally compelling. The film often feels like a carefully staged image without the necessary emotional architecture to support it.
