Wuthering Heights Movie Review: Shiny, blunt outline of a compelling story

Wuthering Heights Movie Review:

Beneath the glimmer of polished visuals, anachronistic pop music, and edgy hyper-sexualisation, you can feel the intensity of Emily Bronte’s original story at all times. The novel is drenched in the ache, melancholy and the simmering passion of insurmountable love held at bay by the thin and yet frustratingly relentless veneer of societal barriers. Wuthering Heights (2026) shows the heaviness of that shade of love that demands adjectives like “simmering”, “all-consuming”, and “heavy”. The 2026 adaptation is largely bereft of any such intricacy. It instead swaps this torrential wave of emotions, this unbridled love, with conspicuous eroticism, which shouldn’t have been a problem. But if it was going down that route, the film would have benefited more by completely immersing itself in that reinterpretation, exploring Catherine and Heathcliffe’s relationship entirely through an erotic lens, showing how their love for each other constantly torments them by manifesting itself through the singular language of extreme, unbridled lust.

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif

Instead, what we get are unsubtle, often isolated, and emotionless erotic moments. Sometimes, these moments feel artificial and are not attached to the characters. Catherine slowly sticks her finger inside the mouth of a fish trapped inside a block of jelly. There is an extreme close-up of a slug’s gelatinous foot gliding over a glass, complete with squishy sound effects for emphasis. Some of these scenes help to convey the emotional state of the characters. However, most of the time, it feels like a desperate attempt to search for the most sexual in the mundane. The film isn’t communicating with the audience through the characters. Instead, the props, the costumes, the lighting, the sound effects, and the people inside the frame are merely used in isolation to evoke empty eroticism. It is like the social media cooking trend, in which, through slick editing, sound effects and a bit of exaggerated acting, we are led to believe something erotic is happening, but in fact, the person is just cooking the food. It is amusing, but to no greater extent than to just amuse you. It is bereft of storytelling. This is not to say the film isn’t concerned with storytelling.

Margot Robbie survives the bland characterisation of Catherine by leaning hard into the character’s confused sense of self and resulting frustration, with a child’s immaturity. Jacob Elordi, on the other hand, plays Heathcliff with simmering intensity that effortlessly overpowers every scene. The toughest job for the actors is the tremendous effort it seemingly requires to make the dialogue sound sincere. There is no room for subtext, psychological depth, or nuance. There is even a garish allusion to how Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance mirrors Romeo and Juliet by making a character reiterate the classic so you remember all the ways in which they resemble each other. Whatever the characters feel for each other, even that which is usually unconscious, is spelt out with patronising apparentness.

Wuthering Heights (2026) is gorgeous to look at. The framing, the lighting, and the colours show total surrender and devotion to the romanticism and gothic roots of its source material. Thankfully, the film succeeds in communicating Catherine and Heathcliff’s painful yearning, the melancholy of surrender to fate, and how unlived lives continue to haunt us. Interestingly, what also comes through wonderfully is the tragedy of Heathcliff. How a boy from the bottom rung of society is stripped of dignity and sense of self, and is repeatedly made a pet for the upper class. His total moral degradation as he goes through this vicious cycle is captured as well.

Wuthering Heights (2026) is a shiny, low resolution version of an intricate source material. What it lacks in nuance, the film tries to find in cinematic punctuations of erotic moments. But without intimacy and psychological depth, these erotic moments serve little more than to be vaporous scintillations.