A commercial fairytale designed to hit you at extremes – you are either unbearably horny and obsessed with Jacob Elordi, or heartbroken, devastated, and borderline insane. Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026) has nothing to do with Emily Brontë. This is not an adaptation, the quotation marks make that impossible to ignore, it’s a pop fantasy of lust and obsession. In interviews, the emphasis is rarely on narrative, character, or literary legacy, but on experience: “something to watch with your girlfriends, something hot, emotional”. Passion is framed less as tragedy than as entertainment, chemistry replaces psychology, obsession becomes a selling point. What Fennell understands and leans into completely, is cinema as experience. It is designed to be felt: intensely, immediately, physically.
Desire is the primary language, passion is the product. Everything else is secondary. “Wuthering Heights” doesn’t really want to speak to classical literature so much as brush past it. It presents itself as a pop moment, a Valentine’s-coded spectacle built to make you feel fast and feel lascivious. It aims for arousal, heartbreak, obsession, tears, sometimes all in the same scene. And somehow, against my will, it works.
Desire is the primary language, passion is the product. Everything else is secondary.
That’s why the film lives closer to fantasy than to realism. Everything is polished, heightened, carefully artificial: the costumes, the spaces, the images. The story loosens its grip on narrative and becomes something closer to emotional choreography, engineered for impact rather than depth. This isn’t an adaptation chasing timelessness or fidelity. It wants immediacy. It wants to hit now, look good doing it, and linger just long enough to make you cry, even if you’re not entirely sure why. Compared to previous adaptations, for example Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights from 2011, with its raw, almost brutal realism and the way violence spreads like a contagion, Fennell’s version flips the script. The movie isn’t interested in the novel’s cruelty, its moral ambiguity, or its social violence. It’s for an audience fluent in pop language, visual excess, and emotional intensity. It’s for viewers who want to feel a lot, quickly, and beautifully. Fennell doesn’t pretend otherwise. The quotation marks tell you everything.
If you are a big Emily Brontë fan, save your nervous system and stay at home, rewatching some earlier, more classical adaptation. It’s very much a fairy tale. The story moves fast, the details are sparse, and you don’t really go deep into the characters or their psyche. It’s all surface, a performance of feeling rather than feeling itself. Beautiful, intoxicating, overwhelming, but not deep. You leave impressed, maybe wrecked, but you don’t leave changed.
This is why the film feels closer to a campaign than a period drama. Every frame looks like it was staged for a magazine spread, every gesture calculated, every room, every colour, every angle screaming at you.
The stylization, the excess, the artificiality push the film closer to pop fantasy than Gothic tragedy. The soundtrack is important here. Charli XCX’s presence anchors the film firmly in now. Not “timeless,” not “literary,” but aggressively contemporary. Her music doesn’t elevate the story so much as reposition it as pop object, as emotional high, as something to be consumed intensely and collectively. This is why the film feels closer to a campaign than a period drama. Every frame looks like it was staged for a magazine spread, every gesture calculated, every room, every colour, every angle screaming at you. There’s almost no interest in interiority or moral complexity, nobody is thinking, nobody is reflecting.
There’s a clear wink toward doomed romance – the Romeo and Juliet echo is anything but subtle. It flattens the love story into something mythic and preordained, less about choice than about collision. Their passion feels inevitable, destructive, and staged as such. You can still trace the storyline, especially if you already know it, but it slips in and out of focus. What matters more is not what happens, but how it feels in the moment, how desire is framed, how obsession is stretched, how tragedy is aestheticized until it becomes almost abstract. That same logic carries into Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) life after marrying Linton (Jacob Elordi). The film opens up into color, grandeur, and spectacle, drifting fully into fairytale territory. Endless gowns, exaggerated hairstyles, perfectly composed rooms. Visually, it’s overwhelming. On paper, it’s everything she’s supposed to want. And yet, the more elaborate it becomes, the emptier it feels. Cathy moves through parties and interiors like a guest in her own life, surrounded by beauty that never quite reaches her.
Fennell treats this stretch of the story as deliberate surface. Cathy isn’t so much conflicted as suspended inside a fantasy that doesn’t belong to her. The fairytale keeps escalating, louder and shinier, until the absence at its centre becomes impossible to ignore. All that gloss only starts to mean something again when it collides with the original, destructive passion, the one force the film insists is real enough to cut through the spectacle. And still, credit where it’s due: Jacqueline Durran’s costume design is extraordinary, turning Margot Robbie into a moving image of excess and longing, beautiful enough that I’d watch the film again just to sit inside those looks a little longer!
Casting does a lot of heavy lifting here. It’s hard to imagine this film generating the same level of noise, fantasy, and desire without Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi at its center
Casting does a lot of heavy lifting here. It’s hard to imagine this film generating the same level of noise, fantasy, and desire without Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi at its center. Their chemistry holds the whole thing together. Strip them away, and all the gloss and theatricality might collapse under its own weight. With them, it becomes strangely intoxicating, even when the film itself stays emotionally thin. The erotic charge never really recedes. There’s something almost excessive about it, hovering between romance and near-pornographic intensity, but rendered beautifully enough to feel intentional rather than crude.
You can sense how much the film relies on Elordi’s presence in particular. The camera knows exactly what it’s doing. The effect is familiar: swooning, fixation, the kind of cinematic crush designed to follow you home. It’s easy to imagine these images detaching themselves from the film entirely, reborn as edits and loops, Charli XCX in the background, desire flattened into something instantly shareable. Like Saltburn before it, this is pop cinema that understands fandom, heat, and obsession and isn’t shy about building itself around them.
For me, the film works best as a beautiful surface. A glossy magazine story, a luxury campaign, a fairytale trailer stretched to feature length. It’s stunning, seductive, meticulously staged and emotionally light. There’s no real descent, no lingering damage, no depth to fall into. Maybe it’s the point. Fennell seems fully aware that she’s making something to be looked at, felt, and shared, not unpacked or wrestled with. Wuthering Heights becomes less a story to sit with than an experience to pass through. And on that note, I’ll go put on “Wall of Sound” by Charli XCX and mourn Cathy and Heathcliff the only way this film really asks me to: aesthetically, dramatically, and just a little bit unwell.
Nina Victoria Marks
