Reinventing Wuthering Heights
Over the years, more than thirty adaptations of Wuthering Heights have been made – for cinema, television and the stage alike. The novel’s enduring grip has repeatedly drawn filmmakers back to it, its fascination transcending linguistic and cultural borders. Luis Buñuel ventured his own Spanish-language version with Abismos de Pasión (1954); even Jacques Rivette succumbed to its pull with Hurlevent (1985).
In many respects, however, the most accomplished adaptation remains Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film – a contemporary, handheld reimagining that makes the viewer more than a passive witness. The camera plunges into marshland, scrapes against thorny branches, buries itself in horses’ manes. Like most versions, Arnold’s omits substantial portions of the novel, yet it stands apart in its determination to render, with as much realism as possible, the social and human abrasiveness at the heart of Emily Brontë’s book.
At the centre of these recurring reinterpretations lies the disconcerting figure of Heathcliff – one of the most brutal male characters ever to become the object of romantic yearning. An oppressed child reduced to the status of a beast – regarded with disgust, marked by his difference, the Other. Brontë describes him in adulthood as dark-skinned, “gypsy in aspect,” yet in dress and manners a gentleman – as much a gentleman as any country squire. Slightly slovenly, perhaps, though not unbecoming in his negligence, erect and handsome in figure, with a distinctly morose air – and carrying about him a trace of under-bred pride.
Rescued from the streets as a child by a benevolent landowner, Heathcliff is brought to Wuthering Heights, where he becomes the target of various forms of cruelty from other men. Only Catherine, the landowner’s daughter – effectively a surrogate sister – accepts him as he is, recognising in his wildness a reflection of her own. The tragedy of the story lies in love’s impossibility, experienced as a curse that continues to torment even after Cathy’s death.
The debate over Heathcliff’s cultural afterlife – and the way he has been aestheticised, even beatified, through the casting of handsome, charismatic white actors – is hardly new. He has been played by Laurence Olivier, Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Dalton. Yet he has also been James Howson – in Arnold’s reinterpretation – a Black actor who arguably understood more clearly than anyone what the character represents. His Heathcliff’s rage is directed at a world that has ostracised and marginalised him, that has turned him into alterity itself.
Arnold often keeps him in shadow – half-hidden in doorways, lurking in corners, listening at doors, present and absent at once. Remove the racial dimension from Brontë’s work, and much of that meaning dissipates; what remains is a vaguer, more generalised class resentment. This is not to deny the merits of his predecessors – each carries a spark of the literary original. Wuthering Heights is, after all, such a dense and fleshy novel that one can extract the version that best fits one’s vision. Typically, adaptations trim the extensive second generation – arguably the novel’s most humanist strand (it survives, at least partially, in the version starring Tom Hardy) – the section in which Heathcliff becomes obsessed with Catherine’s ghost.
Other sequences recur almost verbatim across adaptations: the encounter with the Lintons, the pivotal moment when Cathy and Heathcliff begin to drift apart and she discovers a world beyond the house.
Conversations about adaptations tend to revolve around fidelity to the source, far less around the ways a film might deepen or enrich it. Among my favourites is a scene in William Wyler’s 1939 film, where a dishevelled, mud-splattered Laurence Olivier storms a bourgeois gathering, curses the guests, and promises revenge. In the same adaptation, Cathy’s ghost physically assaults a stranger who has taken refuge in her former bedroom. And then there is a wordless moment in Arnold’s film: Heathcliff, newly returned in gentleman’s shoes, stumbling through the estate’s mud – as if his feet no longer recognise the path home.
For all the novel’s darkness, its screen versions differ widely in tone. On YouTube, one can find numerous fan-made adaptations – hardly compelling as cinema, yet avidly watched – simply because they include, almost literally, every line from Brontë’s text.
And yet Wuthering Heights remains, in many ways, a difficult novel to adapt, despite the apparent accessibility of its prose. Structurally, it is built on a double perspective. Its primary narrator, Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, is partial and unreliable – chameleonic, recounting only those fragments that marked her emotionally, fragments themselves narrated long after the events occurred. Her account of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship is also marked by distance. As she herself admits, their meetings took place away from prying eyes, on a rock where they would retreat to fantasise together.
Then there is Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, who hears the story from Nelly and filters it through his own literary sensibilities. In other words, Lockwood attempts to weave further meaning around Nelly’s account, while Nelly herself strives to serialise and amplify events, embellishing them with aesthetic flourishes. Few film adaptations, however, grant Nelly a presence of real consequence within the narrative.
The 2026 adaptation – coincidentally – does, though for entirely different reasons.
Nelly Is to Blame!
Wuthering Heights has gradually become one of the most frequently adapted novels of all time, each new version absorbing not only the socio-cultural undercurrents proposed by Brontë but also the obsessions of the decade that produced it. The latest adaptation, directed by Emerald Fennell – who made her directorial debut with Promising Young Woman, a film that opened up bold new avenues of feminist representation – announces an abrupt break with the novel.
As Fennell herself explains, this iteration – whose title is stylised with quotation marks – pushes the problem of perspective even further. It is conceived as an attempt to recreate the sensations she experienced at 14, when she first read the novel. By placing the title in quotation marks, the film signals from the outset that this is already a memory of a memory: Brontë’s novel itself unfolds through Nelly’s recollections. What we witness, then, feels like a chain of retellings, each repetition loosening the grip of the original words, until meaning begins to thin out.
Fennell’s Heights, however, is anything but a sudden flash from a teenage imagination. It is, at times, a sadistic fantasy about sexual power games, about physical constraints (corsets, tight dresses, braided hair), about moral constraints (codes of conduct, rigid social decorum).
The female characters make this especially clear. Nelly, here reduced to a largely static presence, spends her time knitting or reading, watchful and inwardly simmering. She communicates more through glances than speech and ultimately emerges as the scapegoat for Cathy and Heathcliff’s tragedy. In Fennell’s version, she is the illegitimate daughter of Mr Earnshaw – Catherine’s father – rather than the household servant of Brontë’s novel. Deprived of formal authority by her ambiguous status, she exercises influence only through insinuation and quiet manipulation.
Catherine and Isabella – in the novel, Isabella is Edgar’s sister; here, she becomes his ward – appear almost as mirrored dolls. Where Catherine is exuberant and unruly, Isabella is timid and submissive. Both are framed through the metaphor of the corset: one struggles to break free from it, the other embraces it as a form of sexual repression, eventually quite literally chained like a dog, becoming Heathcliff’s possession. Is this Fennell’s commentary on the recent trend of modern women gravitating back toward the idealised role of the traditional housewife?
The quotation-marked title also gestures toward a postmodern game of adaptation: the text becomes a pretext, stripped down to its most brutal essentials for an audience eager to receive its message faster, louder, with more punch. The central obsession of Brontë’s novel – their unconsummated sexual desire, the force that gnaws at Cathy and Heathcliff and continues to haunt them (in the book, Heathcliff is so consumed by fixation that he exhumes Catherine’s corpse) – survives only in the film’s first half.
The second half gives way to a relentless string of foreplay scenes between Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), both edging into self-parody: licked fingers, kneaded dough, saliva and sweat, hair whipped by the wind, heated encounters in carriages, on hilltops, behind the house, even at a funeral – wherever opportunity presents itself.
What Version of Heathcliff Do We Get This Time?
Elordi’s Heathcliff veers toward caricature in his bestial, ragged incarnation – with wind-whipped, Frankensteinian hair, still carrying traces of his recent turn as Frankenstein – stumbling through a carefully crafted rustic accent and lines bordering on parody: “Are you cold, Catherine? Wait – let me break this chair with my bare hands and throw it on the fire.” Yet he is also drenched in romantic excess, holding his hands above her head to shield her from the rain.
In his aristocratic phase, he becomes little more than a slick opportunist with a gold tooth, ostentatiously licking his fingers in public. For Fennell, the all-consuming dimension of Heathcliff – the very substance of Brontë’s universe – is effectively absent. In its place stands a hyper-stylized macho archetype – aestheticised scars, dominant swagger and all.
The Dorian Gray Effect
Heathcliff is not the only character reshaped – others are altered as well – though the decision to fold Catherine’s brother into her father (played superbly by Martin Clunes) is not in itself objectionable. The film’s deeper issue lies elsewhere: despite promising catharsis, it creates a striking disconnect between the trauma the characters are meant to endure and the settings in which it unfolds.
Emotion is replaced by latex, kitsch plastics, oversized cardboard fruit, artificial vegetation. Fennell knowingly assembles a collage of familiar imagery: Alice in Wonderland meets Marie Antoinette meets Barbie, fused into a chromatic explosion that is exhausting, even abrasive in its oversaturation. Every object in the frame aspires to be a work of art, making the image visually overwhelming – impossible to fully take in.
In discussing the film’s set design, Fennell has emphasised that she was less interested in historical accuracy than in populating the frame with objects resonant with the era. The result, however, is a world in which neither sorrow nor longing can fully register. Catherine’s death unfolds within a décor vivant – a fresco of flesh, freckles and veins. She dies, yet the walls seem to pulse with life – as if vitality itself had shifted into the décor, Dorian Gray–style. The red floor becomes an omen of her lost pregnancy; each room carries its own colour code, its own emotional register.
The overall aesthetic recalls Sion Sono’s 2016 Antiporno, where the protagonist inhabits a cardboard universe, producing a powerful alienation effect. In the absence of genuine feeling, emotion is externalised through décor – the alcoholic father dies in a room stacked with empty bottles.
The film opens with a Kuleshovian provocation: what are we to make of a man’s semi-erotic gasps? Is he about to die, to climax, to experience pleasure or pain? Fennell keeps the screen black until irritation sets in, only to reveal a decapitation.
What lingers throughout is a creeping fatigue: an exercise in superiority – complete with aerial perspectives and postmodern excess – a too-much-ism that ultimately proves more draining than transgressive.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.