Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Cathy in “Wuthering Heights”. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
This is what I want to know: what is the exact combination of corsetry and thwarted desire which makes a bosom physically heave? And can you attain it if you’ve ever been dumped over Snapchat while wearing a £15 Vivienne Westwood knock-off from Shein? And, relatedly, do the puddle-soaked hems of baggy jeans feel just as heavy while you wait for your Heathcliff at the 253 bus stop as the mud-soaked hems of petticoats feel while you wait for him on the wily, windy moors?
Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights is the latest big-screen attempt to reach across the centuries and make a classic story of deeply felt, reckless, raunchy first love resonate with today's teenage girls and young women.
“Balanced youthful relevance with fidelity to Shakespeare’s verse” Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet (1996). Photo: 20th Century Fox/Getty
This is a noble goal for cinema. I can remember watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet pull off a comparable feat in 1997, when I was myself a girl who “hath not yet seen the change of fourteen years” and there’s no buzz like it. But then Luhrman’s film is – as the kids say – goated, because, by virtue of Leonardo DiCaprio in a Hawaiian shirt, My So-called Life-era Claire Danes and that house cover of Young Hearts Run Free, it balanced youthful relevance with fidelity to Shakespeare’s 400-year-old verse.
The sex scenes are, intentionally, as over-ripe as the rugby-ball-sized strawberry that Cathy nibbles on
Other great literary adaptations have leaned further in one direction or the other. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) ditches the text of the 1815 novel Emma in favour of a Valley Girl vernacular, now iconic in its own right, but Austen’s meddling matchmaker is still unmistakably reincarnated in Alicia Silverstone’s Cher. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) is faithful, both in letter and spirit, to the book Mary Shelley wrote when she was just 18, but layers a 61-year-old film-maker’s perspective on the possibility of redemptive grace. Maybe The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s upcoming film starring Jessie Buckley, will find a fresh way to explore female agency in a monstrous male world.
Stacey Dash and Alicia Silverstone in the “iconic” Clueless (1995), an adaptation of Austen’s Emma. Photo: Paramount Pictures/Getty
All this is to say that no one should give a smashed egg on a bed about what liberties Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” takes with the novel. They oughtn’t to even if our expectations hadn’t already been strategically lowered by the title’s coy inverted commas. What matters is how this new film understands and then translates the story’s essence to a new generation of free-running young hearts.
Fennell’s film is communing with one horny teenager in particular: herself at 14, which goes some way to explaining why she has cast Jacob Elordi, a white actor from Saltburn, as the racially othered romantic hero, Heathcliff. Says Fennell: “[He] looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read.” So she has definitely read it, we’re assured. But presumably white supremacy is such a powerful intoxicant it can impair reading comprehension skill, beyond even the powers of a £50,000-a-year school to remedy? Whatever. This is the woman’s fantasy and she’s entitled to it. Up to and including having Margot Robbie, her bestie from the Barbie set, play a 35-year-old teenager.
Without all the racism… there’s no real impediment to Cath ’n' Heath skipping off into that garish CGI sunset together
The problem with this is that Heathcliff’s non-white racial identity in Wuthering Heights isn’t a decorative flourish, but central to the twisted love story which Fennell claims is her focus. Without all the racism, and the way in which it cements Heathcliff’s lower-class status, regardless of whatever fortune he may acquire, there’s no real impediment to Cath ’n' Heath skipping off into that garish CGI sunset together, and no compelling psychological basis for their saucy S&M sex games.
Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Those sex scenes are, intentionally, as over-ripe as the rugby-ball-sized strawberry that Cathy nibbles on, but – again, because of the batty casting – unintentionally risible. When Cathy’s sexuality is awakened – as a mere girl of 35! – by the intensely erotic sight of … er … a snail on a window pane, she nips off to the moors to masturbate. There, Heathcliff comes across her (not like that) and her reaction is a shamefaced confusion that might make sense in a much younger character.
It doesn’t help the scene’s emotional grounding that the fibreglass boulders they frolic among look more indigenous to the latest attraction at Disney’s Magic Kingdom than anything in the West Yorkshire landscape. Or that Cathy is dressed up like an Oktoberfest serving-wench on a 70s Mills & Boon cover. Or that the film’s general approach to costume borrows its visual grammar from a TikTok clothes-haul video.
That’s not to say Fennell’s film doesn’t include several lovely frocks, some striking set pieces and a Charli xcx track to go head-to-head with Kate Bush’s immortal banger. But compare it with the earthy naturalism of Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take on Wuthering Heights – a film which, notably, had the artistic integrity to engage with Brontë’s themes of race and class – and all that maximalism is still lacking.
Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer as the young Heathcliff and Cathy in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011).
The notion that an Instagram-friendly aesthetic might substitute for authentic emotion and intelligent thought is insulting. And not primarily to the Brontës’ literary legacy – paperback sales are up 469%, and real ones know the novel’s not a patch on Jane Eyre anyway. It’s an insult to the teenage girls and young women who deserve to have their inner lives taken seriously. If not by their parents, or their peers, or the platforms that ruthlessly monetise their insecurities, then at least in the sacred dark of the cinema.
Wuthering Heights is in UK and Irish cinemas now
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, with Mark Kermode on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.