Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Fails as an Adaptation?

Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights reimagines Wuthering Heights as an intense, visually stylized romance centered on the destructive bond between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi.

The film abandons the novel’s layered frame narrative and generational structure, instead focusing solely on Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate, obsessive relationship from childhood to Catherine’s death. Gone are the second-generation characters and much of the novel’s exploration of inheritance, class conflict, and social marginalization.

While the adaptation delivers saturated visuals and heightened sensuality, it replaces the bleak Gothic atmosphere and psychological torment of Emily Bronte’s original with aesthetic spectacle and eroticized drama. The result is a lush but emotionally flattened retelling that prioritizes style and virality over the novel’s themes of trauma, revenge, and generational consequence.

When Emerald Fennell took on Wuthering Heights, it should have been a tale filled with storm and shadow. Instead, what came out feels more like a fever dream crafted for social media than a true adaptation of Emily Bronte's fierce Gothic tragedy. The result is visually striking and undeniably stylized, but it lacks emotional depth; it's a version of Heights without its haunting elements. Fennell's film focuses almost exclusively on the intense relationship between Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, and Catherine Earnshaw.

However, this narrow focus removes the essential structure of the novel. Brontë’s complex frame narrative Nelly Dean’s unsettling account told to Mr. Lockwood is completely left out. What we get is a straightforward, emotionally charged romance that starts in Catherine’s childhood and ends with her death, eliminating the second generation whose lives reveal the long-lasting impact of trauma. In the novel, love doesn’t end with death; it evolves. It erodes inheritance, property, and identity.

In Fennell’s version, it simply burns bright and then fades away. The aesthetic choices also contribute to this divide. Brontë’s Yorkshire moors are not romantic settings; they are psychological landscapes bleak, wind-swept, and harsh. They reflect the characters' moral struggles. Critics like Sanda Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe the Heights as a place filled with random violence and deep-seated hatred, where even domestic spaces feel oppressive.

Fennell replaces this dread with a glossy look. Saturated sunsets, luxurious fabrics, and slow-motion shots turn the Gothic tension into mere spectacle. The moors stop being threatening and start to shimmer. The house ceases to suffocate and begins to glow. What was once a study of spiritual decay turns into aesthetic sadness. One of the most significant changes is the removal of Hindley Earnshaw.

In Brontë’s text, Hindley forcing Heathcliff into servitude fuels Heathcliff’s desire for revenge. His brutal nature is shaped by class humiliation. Critics like Terry Eagleton and Arnold Kettle argue that class, inheritance, and property are not just background details; they drive the novel’s violence. By excluding Hindley and the class issues that influence the story, the film reduces Heathcliff’s motives to romantic obsession. His anger shifts from social retaliation to mere jealousy. His revenge loses its economic context.

The novel’s sharp commentary on wealth, exclusion, and power fades away into a softer melodrama. The treatment of Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is equally important. In the book, he is often described as dark and foreign. His origins are unclear, and many scholars link his marginalization to colonial displacement or racial exclusion in Georgian England. By casting Jacob Elordi, this ambiguity effectively disappears.

The racial “othering” that highlights Heathcliff’s alienation is lost, along with one of the novel’s most unsettling aspects. What we are left with is a tortured romantic hero, rather than a socially displaced person shaped by systemic hostility. Isabella Linton's character also changes. In Brontë’s novel, her relationship with Heathcliff involves psychological and physical terror rather than erotic rebellion.

He uses marriage as a weapon, exploiting Isabella to hurt Catherine and assert control. Fennell reframes this as consensual BDSM, turning what began as brutality into something more palatable. This change doesn't just update the story; it sanitizes it. Abuse transforms into stylized desire, and violence becomes portrayed as tension linked to kink. The harsh reality of Heathcliff’s cruelty becomes softened, almost seductive a transformation that feels more like post–Fifty Shades eroticism than Victorian Gothic. The raw horror of coercion is replaced with curated rebellion.

The trend this film represents is hard to miss. In an age where adaptations seek virality, fidelity to the original often gets sacrificed for visual appeal. There’s a difference between a fresh take and a reduction. Bold visual language can exist alongside loyalty to the text, as shown by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which kept Shakespeare’s words while reimagining the look and feel. Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, seems to trim away the structural complexity to highlight aesthetic mood and shock value. The Gothic becomes a product, and trauma turns into filmic detail.

To call it a failed adaptation does not overlook its visual strength. The film is eye-catching, sensual, and careful with its style. But Brontë’s novel is more than just a love story. It examines generational trauma, class struggles, racial exclusion, and how obsession transforms over time. It tells a story about inherited cruelty. By ending with Catherine’s death and removing the second generation, the film cuts out the novel’s most poignant message: that trauma doesn’t vanish with its lovers. It lingers. It multiplies.

For fans of Brontë’s Gothic tragedy, this adaptation feels less like a new interpretation and more like a distortion a change from wild psychological horror to stylized romantic doom. The storm has been beautified. The hatred has been softened. The ghost has been banished. What remains, no matter how beautiful, feels oddly un-haunted.