Emerald Fennell presents her take on Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic novel Wuthering Heights, staring Margot Robbie as Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw & Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. The project marks Fennell’s next feature following Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023). Wuthering Heights centres on the turbulent relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and is set on the Yorkshire moors, exploring themes of class, inheritance, revenge, and generational conflict. The novel has been adapted multiple times for film and television, and Fennell’s version represents the latest contemporary reinterpretation of the classic work.

Fennell’s version feels less like a polite literary adaptation and more like a fever dream pulled straight from the moors. Rather than treating Emily Brontë’s gothic classic as sacred text, Fennell leans into its brutality, sado-masochism and sickly obsession.

Fennell describers her approach to the adaption as ‘There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.” Working on it has been a kind of masochistic exercise’.

Fennell goes on to say; ‘I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it at 14, which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.’

This description suck with me when considering the film I just watched. I’ve read some bad reviews already and I must say that I disagree. Wuthering Heights is an enormous mountain to climb and this version is perfect for 2026. It’s for the girls. And what a breath of fresh air that is. When considering period film/TV for their accuracy, they always fall short. However it’s rarely – if ever – done from the female gaze. For example, a woman might still be graphically depicted being brutalised for historical accuracy but her teeth are gleaming white, her skin clean, her hair perfectly dyed. So what a refreshing sight to see this film gleefully dance around historical accuracy with their audience – girls, gays & theys. The gowns, the interior design, the hopelessly beautiful cast, all present a sensory delight to the audience. How incredible it is that Margot Robbie was considered too old to play Cathy – but did anyway. When does that ever happen in film for a female lead? This Wuthering Heights is for and by women and no one can make me hate it for that.

Sitting in the theatre I could hear the gasps and feel the tension – the film perfectly captured eroticism and sexual fantasy for a female audience. Which brings me back to Fennell wanting to capture the feeling she felt reading it at 14, Heathcliff was very much the brutish, dormant, wildly toxic sexual awakening for many, many young women.