Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' Betrays the Book to Save the Film

What happens when you take literature's most unfilmable love story and strip it down to its primal core? Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights provides a surprising answer: you get the director's best film yet—a "heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time" that succeeds precisely because it abandons the book's unwieldy complexity.

The Art of Literary Betrayal

Fennell has committed what purists might consider sacrilege. She's jettisoned the novel's notoriously convoluted second half entirely—a move most Wuthering Heights adaptations attempt. But she goes further, removing major characters and simplifying motivations to focus laser-sharp on the central obsession between Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi).

As a devoted fan of Emily Brontë's original, I expected to approach this version with crossed arms. The novel's later chapters veer into deliriously twisted territory that forms much of its unique appeal. Yet Fennell's narrowed focus proves surprisingly effective—she's made a weighty, sprawling work feel nimble and urgent.

The question isn't whether this is faithful to Brontë. It's whether it captures something essential about the story that more "respectful" adaptations have missed.

MTV Meets Gothic Romance

Fennell's aesthetic philosophy is "loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface." The camera lingers obsessively on dripping egg yolks and bubbling dough. Cathy wades through pig's blood, leaving viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress. This isn't subtlety—it's a deliberate collision between beauty and filth that mirrors the novel's central tension.

Where her previous film Saltburn felt cartoonish in its near-contemporary setting, Wuthering Heights transforms the Yorkshire moors into what feels like a Meat Loaf video's "flamboyant theatricality." Everything is appropriately dialed up: the titular mansion is a "dark, foreboding shambles," while the neighboring estate features rooms devoted entirely to ribbons and wallpaper that replicates Cathy's skin down to the freckles.

The Sound of Obsession

Charli XCX's pop soundtrack shouldn't work in a 19th-century Gothic romance, yet it feels startlingly natural. The film opens with what sounds like erotic groaning over a black screen—revealed to be the final gasps of a hanged man. These touches are "thuddingly blunt" but effective, forcing viewers to confront how closely sex and death intertwine in this story.

Robbie and Elordi's chemistry anchors the visual excess. Both major Hollywood talents "can smirk, scream, and sob with the best of them," but it's the "gleeful visuals and sounds" that truly propel the narrative forward.

Why Realism Fails This Story

The contrast with Andrea Arnold's 2011 adaptation is instructive. Arnold attempted a "much more muted, credible tone," even casting a mixed-race actor as Heathcliff to acknowledge the character's ambiguous ethnic background. While interesting, that version "felt flat, bereft of Brontë's eccentric flourishes."

Fennell understands that Wuthering Heights exists in an emotional landscape that's "dreamy and at times ludicrous"—it "struggles on more realistic grounding." The story demands the heightened reality of melodrama, not the measured tones of kitchen-sink realism.

Class, Desire, and Victorian Repression

Beneath the visual spectacle lies a sharp understanding of the novel's social critique. Cathy and Heathcliff begin as a "gleefully untamed duo," but the arrival of the "sweet but stuffy" Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) introduces the "harsh realities of class and Victorian society."

Cathy "might be as uninhibited as Heathcliff when roaming the outdoors," but a woman of her status cannot marry a foundling-turned-servant. This transforms Heathcliff into a "vengeful, horny demigod"—the "paragon of Byronic anti-heroism" who's "as cruel as he is seductive."

Fennell "sands off the more abusive edges" of the literary Heathcliff while preserving his essential nature: domineering, callous, and "hell-bent on embarrassing a community that can't take him seriously as a potential husband."

Perhaps the real test isn't whether an adaptation preserves every plot point, but whether it captures the feeling of reading the original for the first time—that sense of encountering something wild, uncontainable, and utterly unlike anything else.