Heathcliff Gets a Glow-Up: The Loss of Subtext in Wuthering Heights (2026)

Novels often provide room for readers to create their own mental pictures rather than supplying highly detailed visual guidelines. A single description on a page produces countless images in readers’ minds, shaped by their unique experiences and perspectives. When people read a book, they actively construct the story in their minds, imagining the characters, settings, and atmosphere in ways that feel real to them. As a result, the same scene can look completely different in the minds of two readers. In contrast to novels, film delivers a beautifully unified vision; the director’s clear creative direction shapes every frame, inviting audiences into a fully realized world that feels cohesive and purposeful. But what happens when a director chooses style over substance? At what point does breathtaking cinematography become just a flimsy cover for a gaping wound where the plot should be?

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026) is a loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same title. The film opens in 1771 with a public hanging that sends the crowd, including a young Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), into a disturbing, almost gleeful frenzy, and establishes an unserious, silly tone for the rest of the movie. What feels especially bizarre is how this brutal event is treated so lightly, almost as a dark comedy setup, which the rest of the movie doesn’t even follow. There is an immediate distinction between Brontë’s intended characterization of Catherine and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and how Fennell chooses to portray them. In the novel, Catherine is a selfish, self-absorbed, obsessive teenage girl. Fennell's Catherine is more polished and romantic than truly wild. She comes across as whiny, bratty, and occasionally comical in her immaturity. The same goes for Heathcliff, introduced by Brontë as a mysterious, racially ambiguous orphan who was found “dirty, ragged, black-haired” and speaking gibberish on the streets of Liverpool before being brought home by Mr. Earnshaw like a stray. Fennell’s Heathcliff, by contrast, is a brooding heartthrob: tall, sculpted, and sexy in every rain-soaked close-up, his cruelty softened into stylish sulkiness.

Of course, none of this is inherently a problem. Adaptations are not meant to imitate the original story 100 percent, because then nobody would want to make adaptations. Loyalty to every plot point is rarely the goal, and some of the most successful adaptations, such as Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005), succeeded because they take liberties with tone and composition. That being said, the line between interpretation and fundamental misunderstanding becomes blurred when key elements of the source material—things that simply cannot be overlooked when creating an adaptation—are erased. 

Wuthering Heights falters immediately with the decision to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Fennell essentially whitewashes a character that Emily Brontë explicitly described as “dark-skinned.” This racial ambiguity is central to his identity as a marginalized outsider who is subjected to overt racism and social exclusion by the other characters, particularly during his youth. Rather than engaging with the novel’s themes of racial prejudice, Fennell defended her casting by citing her own nostalgic vision, noting that Elordi “looks exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book” she read as a teenager. Consequently, the film’s Heathcliff loses the vital subtext of being a racialized outsider whose villainy is a direct response to a society that refused to accept him; Fennell deprives Heathcliff of this backstory. Similarly, Margot Robbie is cast at age 35 to play a character defined by teenage volatility, which feels more like a haute couture editorial than an immersive Gothic performance.

This artifice is further exacerbated by Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, which, while it is arguably the film's greatest strength, creates a mood that feels more like a fever dream than a grounded drama. Captured on 35mm and VistaVision, the film utilizes expressionistic frames to contrast the dark intensity of the moors with the lavish, eye-searing grandeur of Catherine’s estate, Thrushcross Grange. Sandgren seems to draw on influences such as Gone with the Wind (1939) for its bold, saturated color palette and Cries and Whispers (1972) for its symbolic use of red, yet these visuals often prioritize aesthetics over narrative substance. Fennell leans into a glossy, almost music video-like stylization. Every shot feels meticulously composed, turning the moors into a stylized backdrop and the characters’ anguish into something performative. The technical mastery is undeniably breathtaking on the big screen through swirling fog, milky diffused light, and sweeping landscapes, but put together with the chosen characterizations and themes, it ultimately contributes to the film's broader hollowness. This is further exacerbated by the historically inaccurate costumes, as costume designer Jacqueline Durran admits that the focus of the movie was to mesh contemporary fashion, Old Hollywood, and Victorian fashion. Catherine’s attire takes a sharp turn from Victorian wedding dresses to a 1950s-esque cellophane look. The visuals overwhelm rather than serve the story, effectively misdirecting the audience from the absence of narrative and thematic development.

Wuthering Heights dazzles with virtuosity: lush cinematography, beautiful costume design, and magnetic performances, yet these very strengths expose its core failure. The moors turn into picturesque scenery rather than a Gothic, primal storm; tormented souls fused in mutual obsession become performative melodrama. While adaptations don’t need to mirror every detail, they should, at the very least, honor the source’s weight and spirit. When spectacle overwhelms substance, the result is a glittering shell, beautifully seductive and ultimately hollow.