Talk about melodrama! It is not so much that this adaption of Wuthering Heights goes to eleven, but that this version of Wuthering Heights starts at eleven and keeps going and going, and going, without losing its momentum for a moment. This over-the-top depiction of secret and dangerous passion makes explicit the worst thing about bad relationships: people who are in them are in them by choice. Everyone in Wuthering Heights has agency and everyone who is making bad decisions in this movie is doing so by design. The entire experience is astonishing, gorgeous and stupefyingly hot. We all knew writer-director Emerald Fennell has an unusually sharp eye for sexual danger, but maybe not quite like this. But in every possible way, for all the senses, Wuthering Heights is a sensation.
Who cares that it’s not a literal adaption of the novel by Emily Brontë. I mean, honestly, who cares. Young Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) lives in genteel and impoverished isolation on the Yorkshire moors with her drunken father (a spectacular Martin Clunes) and her lady’s-maid companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen). One day Mr. Earnshaw brings home an abused child (Owen Cooper, the incredible discovery from Adolescence, in his first film role making it clear what a colossal talent he is) for Cathy to keep as a pet. Cathy names him Heathcliff after her dead brother and the new waif allows this change to his identity, because it’s immediately, thoroughly and irrevocably clear that he loves her. How he loves her, as the years pass, is the most dangerous, damaging and smoking hot way possible. As adults Cathy (now Margot Robbie, who does so well here it matters not a jot she is too old for the part) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi, who is so handsome here people will lose their minds) remain obsessed with each other, playing dangerous power games that only Nelly (now Hong Chau) appreciates. The only house nearby is bought by wealthy merchant Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif, more on whom later) who moves in with his ward Isabella (Alison Oliver). Cathy has to marry somebody, and she and her father both want and need Edgar’s money. Edgar in turn takes one look at Cathy and wants her as well. As for what Heathcliff wants? Well, he is a servant. He is the pet. No woman would degrade herself by marrying him. Or would they?
It has honestly been quite some time since a mainstream movie could be called fervid, but Wuthering Heights can be called nothing less. The emotional connection between Cathy and Heathcliff runs red hot from the very beginning but since they have been raised as siblings, despite one having status and the other absolutely not, they cannot allow themselves to give into it. But of course to deny sexual interest means it only becomes hidden – when both people feel it, it never, ever disappears – so the tension between Heathcliff and Cathy only ratches up and up and up. It becomes so extraordinary the audience around me was reacting audibly, gasping and laughing and crying, making noises as inherently sexual as that of the man whose death by hanging opens the film.
A lot of people waste a lot of time pretending they don’t have the capacity to be consumed by desire. The intensity of the attention people pay each other here – Isabella makes dolls of Cathy using her discarded hair, the servants know what Mr. Earnshaw eats from his vomit, while Edgar decorates an entire room to match the colour of Cathy’s skin, including her freckles – borders on the insane. But as anyone who’s ever been in love, or even lust, know: this kind of insanity is indistinguishable from love. If you want it, it is the greatest possible pleasure. If you don’t, it is the worst thing in the world.
Anthony Willis’ score and Charli XCX’s songs enhance the melodrama here like a drug, one that lines up perfectly with the vibe and enables you to have the best night of your life. Suzie Davies’ production design creates houses that are in no way realistic homes, but provide the absolutely correct sense of mood – look at the hand sculptures crawling out of Edgar’s fireplace up to and over his ceiling, or the mountains of intact green bottles with which Mr. Earnshaw has filled his rooms, or the sculpture of the face that looms over Cathy’s childhood kitchen. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography uses wind and stormy weather to further heighten the already heightened moods. The combination of close attention to physical form – scars on a back, laces on a corset being tightened, tears on a cheek, a finger exploring, leaking yolks – with the stylised but always realistic sets somehow manages to maintain the correct tone without the mood going wrong for a second. The rollercoaster of all these overwhelming sensation locks us in from the start and takes us the whole way home without ever once going wrong, which is such an unusual experience that I understand if it’s hard to believe. But trust me; there’s not a single false or weak note anywhere. In the cinema screening that I attended in Berlin, people were reacting as viscerally as at any horror movie, except here the horror is of the most sexual kind.
By this I mean, at every stage and in every way, consent is given for everything that happens. Every act which happens here (in a movie which gets filthy without being the least exploitative) is by design. It must be emphasised how totally every single person here is in charge of their own fate. Occasionally others, most notably Nelly, interfere, but the interference makes no difference whatever to the tug of war between Cathy and Heathcliff and the impact their dynamic has on everybody else. They will have each other. Regardless of their own bodies, regardless of their wishes, regardless of their hearts. They know they should not, they know a relationship between them and a future together is and always has been impossible, they also know very well it’s a galactically bad idea, and yet that makes absolutely no difference.
Ms. Robbie centers the whole catastrophe as an impatient and selfish miss, used to playing with the feelings of others because she cannot possibly express her own, but who thrills when other people, namely Heathcliff, match her intensity and selfishness step by step. Mr. Elordi gives an incredible and very hot performance as someone who will endure any horror if it’s the will of the one he loves, and who is prepared to go straight to hell and like it if that’s what is required. The role of Heathcliff is designed for the fantasy a lot of women have about bad men: “I could fix him,” which is self-explanatory. It requires a very high standard of dreamboat longing and genuine danger and my goodness Mr. Elordi delivers. And yet Mr. Latif is a surprisingly equal rival, showing Edgar a genuine and caring man who is thoughtful and kind, but who is incapable of understanding just how thoroughly he has been lied to. All Edgar’s kindness and sexual intensity is for nothing because it is not desired; it’s a highly irritating truth that being in the wrong relationship brings out the worst in everybody. Mr. Latif does a wonderful job balancing disbelief, denial and decency without ever being a pushover. Finally Ms. Oliver goes very hard indeed in a part that can hardly be described without spoilers, but she makes it clear that even when things are as bad as can possibly be imagined, Isabella still has agency, free will and total choice. Poor Nelly, having to keep cleaning up all this mess, and Ms. Chau provides just the right twists of self-belief and spite to justify why she stays.
Plenty of other reviews are sneering at the melodrama, the desperately passionate romance and all the mistakes the characters make (which are never mistakes when you’re in love). But those reviews are written by people who don’t believe in big feelings, who don’t believe in the possibility of being swept up by emotions you cannot control, or who don’t want to confront the dirty truth that there are power dynamics in every single solitary sexual encounter. There is always one person who wants more than the other, and that means there are always games to be played. For some people, or some relationship, those games are more fun than the sex. And we also can’t ignore the sorry fact that a lot of men don’t like women enough to truly love us, meaning they would absolutely never say even half the things that Heathcliff says to Cathy. Therefore these kinds of men (and misogynists of every gender) prefer to mock and sneer art which exposes these deeply personal emotions instead of admit that this is a fault in themselves. Is loving someone this deeply, this recklessly, this desperately always a good idea? Of course not. But love this overwhelming is in fact the dream, and to see that dream take such perfect shape is an unbelievable experience. My friend and I went into Wuthering Heights with high hopes but low expectations and we were both blown away. Ms. Fennell has delivered a stone cold smash hit that has reset our expectations of what romance can look like onscreen. It is an utter triumph.
Wuthering Heights will be in theaters on February 13, 2026.
Learn more about the film at the official website for the title.
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