Movie Reviews
‘Wuthering Heights’ Review: Bad Romance Makes For Good Movie
2026/136 minutes/rated R (for “sexual content”)
Written and directed by Emerald Fennell
Produced by Emerald Fennell, Josey McNamara and Margot Robbie
Starring: Margot Robbie, Charlotte Mellington, Jacob Elordi, Owen Cooper, Hong Chau, Vy Nguyen, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell
Cinematography by Linus Sandgren
Edited by Victoria Boydell
Score by Anthony Willis
Songs by Charli XCX
Production Companies: MRC, Lie Still and Lucky Chap Entertainment
Opening theatrically on February 12 courtesy of Warner Bros.
I only read “Wuthering Heights” once, in high school. I appreciated its cultural impact and continued popularity. However, regarding mid-1800s literary classics that blend gothic horror sensibilities with romantic melodrama, I honestly preferred Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. I say this only to note that I have no strong feelings about Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel that would leave me unduly vexed at a potentially “unfaithful” adaptation. “Wuthering Heights” is, as explicitly promised by the filmmakers, less a straight-up retelling than a glorified Elseworld. As a movie, or even an example of a singular filmmaker taking an oft-told tale and making it her own, it’s a pretty darn terrific romantic tragedy. Emerald Fennell has crafted a cinematically scrumptious and erotically flavored bodice-ripper of the highest order.
Opening on Thursday night courtesy of Warner Bros., this $85 million, R-rated, 2.25-hour melodrama is a passionate and unapologetically “problematic” epic that uses big bucks and Hollywood movie magic to make this small-scale drama feel like a 1950s biblical epic. It leads with its emotions and thinks with its feelings, diving headfirst into what is never presented as anything less than a doomed, impossible romance between two deeply flawed, traumatized young adults. I won’t pretend that this new movie is terribly outrageous compared to what used to be par for the course for big-budget, just-for-grownups Hollywood erotic dramas. However, it gleefully plays in the blood-and-thunder sandbox. It will likely scandalize (in a healthy way) the multiple generations not used to such unapologetic, adult-skewing, PLF-worthy cinema.
Writer/director Fennell’s latest offering focuses on the core “Catherine and Heathcliff” relationship, which is little different from, frankly, most filmed adaptations going back to William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. Shel has crafted a (my words, not hers) spiritually faithful variation on how the book resonated with her when she first read it. That said, it is no less accurate to the respective text than Guillermo del Toro’s acclaimed and Oscar-nominated Frankenstein. Moreover, if I were a cynical sonuvabitch, and I currently am, I’d note that this latest incarnation, sans even a future-tense framing device, is constructed not unlike It Chapter One. Presuming fortune and glory, WB, Lucky Chap and MRC could justify a second film chronicling what happened after Manderley burned to the… sorry, wrong book.