Is Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s English classic more style than substance? Or can it offer more? (Contains spoilers) 17/03/2026
Please note: this review contains spoilers for Wuthering Heights.
It’s been hard to miss the controversy surrounding Wuthering Heights, British writer and producer Emerald Fennell’s latest release. Starring Margot Robbie of Barbie fame as Cathy, and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Priscilla and Saltburn) as Heathcliff, the film is Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s English classic. It traces Cathy and Heathcliff’s obsessive relationship from their first meeting as children, through to Cathy’s money–motivated marriage to Mr Linton, her affair with Heathcliff and her subsequent death.
When the film premiered on the eve of St. Valentines’ Day, it was met with fiercely divided critique. Some were dismayed at the shallow, “sexed–up” knock–off of an English literary classic, lamenting the candy–crush colour palettes and utterly anachronistic soundtrack. Others praised the film, arguing that “style can be substance when you do it right”.
Both appraisals are, in my view, correct. There is no denying that the depravity, the excess, the “colour-saturated, baroque spectacle” is sickeningly alluring. I was sucked in by it: the hunger, the obsession and the insatiability of the characters’ appetites. I was spellbound by its hedonism from the start. And this horrified me. I was horrified at the film and horrified at myself for watching it.
But then it made sense. If Wuthering Heights is about anything, it’s about humanity’s voracious desires and their dark consequences, and Fennell’s adaptation spoke to that in droves. Even the hollowing out of some of the finer plot points, for me, reflected so much about what we value as a society. More than that, it was a deep reflection of what the Bible tells us about humanity: how our obsession with power, lust and money can corrupt and distort us and ultimately leads to our destruction.
“Heaven did not seem to be my home,” Cathy cries, when she dreamt of heaven and Heathcliff was not there, asking the angels to send her back to Earth to be with him. We, too, have a hunger which draws us away from the divine; a hunger for more money; more power; more sex; more possessions. But we don’t possess them, they possess us. In our search for satisfaction, we seek things that are easy, quick, and spiritually (and often, monetarily) cheap.
This hunger bleeds into every aspect of human life, even the way we experience cinema. It no longer seems to be enough to simply watch a film or hear a story. We must buy the sweatshop–produced T–Shirt, the travel mug, the “sustainable” tote bag. We can’t just watch, we must consume; we must become. And then we toss what we become aside, in exchange for something else.
When Cathy screamed “we are all ill! You have made us all ill” it was as if she was speaking directly to me. I felt the “devil as roaring lion” who “prowls about, finding people to devour” that Peter, one of Jesus’s disciples, describes in 1 Peter 5:8.
When Cathy died, I cried. Not because I thought it was beautiful in and of itself, but because it spoke to me of our own destruction: “Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain,”, Proverbs 1:19 tells us, for “it takes away the life of its possessors”. And it’s taking ours away too.
As in the film, our roaring greed destroys us: our planet; ourselves; our relationships with each other. We dispose of people just as easily as we dispose of things; we discard them both in places we choose to ignore. Even the film’s superficial Christian aestheticism like the jewel–encrusted cross Cathy wears, and Joseph’s reimagining from a pious religious fanatic to a sexual fantasist, felt disgustingly apt. Just as Emily Brontë’s novel held up a mirror to class–obsessed Victorian society, so Fennell’s adaptation lifts up a mirror to our compulsive materialism and superficiality.
The Telegraph argues “Wuthering Heights [is] an obsessive film about obsession”, and they’re right. But the film is more a reflection of our obsessions than it is its own. It’s tagline, “Inspired by the Greatest Love Story”, is fitting on a deep spiritual level. Not because it tells the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, but because it is inspired by another love story.
As American Evangelist Billy Graham famously said: “The whole Bible is a love story. It’s a love story between God and man” and I saw traces of this story scattered across Fennell’s film, but only half of it. With Easter around the corner, I was reminded that as Christians we believe that the redemption of our brokenness is at the heart of our faith.
The sure and certain hope Christians believe the Bible promises, is not found in Wuthering Heights – it ends in death, despair and decay. But as a diagnosis of the problem the Gospel claims to solve, Wuthering Heights rings true. It’s intoxicating, grotesque and shallow, and for that reason, I’d recommend it wholeheartedly. Not because I think you’ll like it, but precisely because I hope you don’t.
