Wuthering Heights (2026): Obsession, Desire and Gothic Excess

For the first screening of Wuthering Heights at my local cinema, my mum and I settled into our favourite seats, surrounded by around sixty other people ready to watch the latest interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel.

We had both enjoyed Saltburn, and I had been particularly taken with Promising Young Woman, so expectations were high. The trailer promised something bold, stylised and unapologetically Gothic. The heightened aesthetic, anachronistic music and costuming did not deter us; if anything, they intrigued us. As the lights dimmed, we were still puzzling over the negative responses to the film as an adaptation, and the persistent marketing of it as “the greatest love story of all time”.

The backlash remains curious. Much of it feels rooted in the long-standing mis-selling of Brontë’s novel. Wuthering Heights has never been a conventional romance, and releasing it as a Valentine’s offering almost guarantees confusion. There also appears to be an enduring discomfort, in some critical quarters, with female sexuality when it is presented as destabilising rather than decorative.

I was far less troubled by the film’s reshaped ending than many commentators have been. Most screen versions remove or sideline the second half of the novel, where Heathcliff’s vengeance ripples into the next generation. In that context, this intervention feels relatively contained. Compared with the liberties taken in Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro, which push Mary Shelley’s creature towards mythic spectacle rather than moral tragedy, Fennell’s alterations remain emotionally coherent within Brontë’s world.

The highs of the Heights

The film is bold and occasionally uneven, but that volatility suits the material. It embraces Gothic excess and emotional extremity rather than smoothing away the roughness. The intensity between Catherine and Heathcliff is convincingly realised, and the narrative does not flinch from cruelty, betrayal or social tension. Love and suffering remain entangled.

Jacob Elordi is striking as Heathcliff. His brooding stillness and magnetic presence give the character weight, while the script preserves flashes of the fierce loyalty that complicate him in the novel. Margot Robbie, usually so seamlessly integrated into her roles, appears slightly adrift here, though visually impeccable. Alison Oliver brings complexity to Isabella, tracing her journey from naïve romantic to someone knowingly entangled. Hong Chau’s Nelly carries an understated manipulative intelligence that aligns well with the novel. Shazad Latif offers a restrained, almost deliberately colourless Edgar Linton. And Martin Clunes chews scenery magnificently. The visual dichotomy between the Earnshaws and the Lintons is particularly effective. The Heights feels elemental and exposed, shaped by weather and temperament. Thrushcross Grange is manicured, ordered and suffocatingly refined. Its red-room interiors subtly echo another recent cinematic exploration of female desire and control, while the immaculate gardens stand uneasily beside the wild moors beyond the wall. Instinct and restraint coexist but never harmoniously.

Where the film truly comes alive is in its engagement with female desire. Catherine and Isabella are neither passive nor idealised; their impulses are disruptive, sometimes self-destructive, and frequently at odds with the social frameworks that contain them. The film also shows the Earnshaws’ servants, Zillah and Joseph, in a fetishistic relationship quietly observed by Catherine and, later, by Heathcliff. In these moments, the adaptation is at its sharpest, showing how intimacy, power and judgement circulate within the household.

Less successful elements

Isabella’s transformation from romantic, naïve girl to a potentially willing participant in a sub-dom dynamic softens Brontë’s striking duality of womanhood. The tension between social compliance and instinctive drive is consequently reduced, and some of the raw conflict that drives the novel is diluted.

The middle stretch, when Cathy reunites with the now wealthy Heathcliff, leans more heavily into conventional romantic rhythms. Here the emotional beats feel familiar and occasionally repetitive, which contrasts with the daring energy of the sections that foreground female desire.

A bold, imperfect addition to the canon

I did enjoy Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell, though not quite as much as I had hoped. The film combines Gothic spectacle, Romantic fervour and flashes of social realism in a way that often feels energised and contemporary. Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship is framed as obsession and possession rather than transcendent romance, which feels truer to the novel’s emotional temperature.

The heightened style, the rejection of cosy heritage realism, and the willingness to risk excess all work in the film’s favour. Not everything lands, and pacing occasionally falters, but the ambition is clear. This is not a timid adaptation. At present, I would place it at three and a half stars, with the possibility of rising on rewatch. It is not definitive, but it is provocative and visually arresting. Crucially, it recognises that the power of Wuthering Heights lies in discomfort rather than consolation.

Screen versions of Wuthering Heights have always varied wildly in tone and interpretation. My own favourites — Wuthering Heights (2011) directed by Andrea Arnold, Abismos de pasión (1954) by Luis Buñuel, and Sparkhouse (2002) — demonstrate just how differently the novel can be approached. Arnold’s elemental realism, Buñuel’s feverish melodrama, and Sparkhouse’s gender-flipped intensity each capture a distinct facet of Brontë’s vision. That variety is precisely why the novel endures. It resists reduction, and no single adaptation can ever contain it.

This 2026 version will not be the last attempt to scale those emotional heights. The moors, it seems, are always waiting.

Wuthering Heights on Screen – A Personal Ranking Extracted from my Bronte Letterboxd list

• Wuthering Heights (2011), directed by Andrea Arnold – ★★★★

• Abismos de pasión (1954), directed by Luis Buñuel – ★★★★

• Sparkhouse (2002), directed by Robin Sheppard – ★★★★

• Wuthering Heights (2026), directed by Emerald Fennell – ★★★½

• Wuthering Heights (2009), directed by Coky Giedroyc – ★★★½

• Wuthering Heights (1939), directed by William Wyler – ★★★

• Wuthering Heights (1992), directed by Peter Kosminsky – ★★★

• Wuthering Heights (1978), directed by Peter Hammond – ★★★

• Wuthering Heights (1970), directed by Robert Fuest – ★★★

• Wuthering Heights (1998), directed by David Skynner – ★★★

• Wuthering Heights (2003), directed by Suri Krishnamma – ★★½

• Wuthering High (2015), directed by Anthony DiBlasi – ★★

• Heathcliff (1999), directed by Terence Bulley – ★★

And finally, here’s an essay I wrote at university on the novel, which remains untouched from that original writing:

EN247: The Nineteenth Century Novel

Tutor: SJ Assignment Due: 19 March 1997, 6.30 pm

Note: It seems the references have disappeared over the intervening 30 years. Soz!  

Examine the nature and extent of Gothic and Romantic influences on Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, was influenced by earlier forms of genre literature, principally the Gothic and the Romantic. However, it is more than just an amalgam of these two genres; it is more realistic in its observations of life, its acute social and political comment, and in its portrayal of violence and control within the family and marriage. Emily Bronte was much more influenced by the currently burgeoning Realism and Naturalism movements; the Romantic movement was beginning to decline and the Gothic novel was definitely obsolete. The Gothic novel had been predominant during the last third of the eighteenth century and the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century, starting in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and ending with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1820. Wuthering Heights, coming almost thirty years later, combines elements of the Gothic with that of both Romanticism, which was at its height from 1750–1870, and the Romantic novel, which has always remained popular.

However, Wuthering Heights was not considered Romantic at the time of its publication. “Jane Eyre is a book which affects the reader to tears; it touches the most hidden sources of emotion. Wuthering Heights casts a gloom over the mind not easily dispelled.” Certainly, Wuthering Heights is not Romantic in the way Jane Eyre is, but it does portray an intensity of passion between Catherine and Heathcliff not common in the mid nineteenth century. Wuthering Heights transcended all expectations of the Victorian novel by presenting a dual image of women — one who was under the social constraints of the period, and one displaying a wilder side that women were not supposed to possess. These instinctive feelings and passions were acknowledged only in men through the image of the Byronic hero, who was (and still is) a popular stereotyped hero of the Romantic novel. The hero’s typical attributes include glamour, a mysterious past, dangerous adventure and passionate affairs. Heathcliff, when first described by Lockwood, immediately conjures up an image of this type of hero: “magnetic … powerful … handsome … melancholic”. But Heathcliff is not the typical Byronic hero as he does not have passionate affairs and stays true to Catherine.

In Victorian literary criticism it was assumed that romance, women and the novel were inseparable — affairs of the heart were seen as the woman’s domain. To write about love and marriage was considered natural. Popular themes in the Romantic novels of the nineteenth century were women choosing husbands, women torn between two lovers (usually one good and one bad) and unrequited or requited love, all of which can be seen in Wuthering Heights. Female writers who wished to express anything other than what women were supposed to write about often adopted male pseudonyms, which is what Emily Bronte was forced to do. Although Emily touches on the popular Romantic issues, she also engages in a critical attack on religion and women’s role in the family, marriage and courtship. Wuthering Heights looks at the naivety of young women entering marriage and can be seen as one of the first novels to question the romantic notion of marriage, which continued to be undermined throughout the remainder of the century through the guise of the popular Romantic genre.

One of the central themes investigated in Wuthering Heights was young women’s lack of knowledge of married life and the difference between courtship and marriage. For example, Catherine has no notion that her courtship relationship with Edgar, in which she holds all the cards, will change once they are married. She naively believes that she can take Edgar’s money and give it to Heathcliff. Isabella also naively believes that Heathcliff will change with the love of a good woman. Bronte, through Heathcliff, dispels this myth and exposes the harm caused by this fantasy: “She abandoned them [the comforts and elegancies of Thrushcross Grange] under a delusion … picturing in me a hero of a romance and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. She persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But, at last, I think she begins to know me.”

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Wuthering Heights as “a masterly fusion of romance and realism”, but when the novel was first published it was regarded as excessively morbid and violent. Emile Montegut’s article A Dark Poetic Imagination, published in 1857, reflects a general trend towards viewing Wuthering Heights in a Gothic light: “Terror predominates from start to finish … Emily’s dark imagination sets before us characters and scenes that are the more fearful because the terror which they inspire is above all a moral one.”

Montegut writes of the terror being a moral one; this observation links Wuthering Heights not only to the Gothic genre but to its smaller sub-genre, the Female Gothic, which combines the realities of family life from a woman’s point of view, especially the relationship between parents and children and brothers and sisters, through a fantastical setting.

The fantastical setting of Wuthering Heights is closely linked to that of the Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which tended to be tales of a macabre, fantastic and supernatural nature. They were usually set amid haunted castles, graveyards, monasteries, dungeons, ruins and wild picturesque and symbolic landscapes which were blessed with both ghosts and adverse weather. (The word ‘wuthering’ itself is a provincial adjective describing an atmospheric tumult.) They had sensational, melodramatic and supernatural qualities and were sprinkled with forlorn characters excelling in the art of melancholy and young girls who were sexually threatened.

Wuthering Heights combines many of these elements: the main location, as the title suggests, is the Heights, a lonely house on the moors which is introduced on the second page as “strongly built … slanting … stunted firs and gaunt thorns … its large jutting stones … grotesque carving over the front … and its inscription over the door”. This description of an oddly shaped and dark house can be read as reflecting the perverted passions and mystery of the novel.

In Gothic novels there is often a real or imagined fear of the supernatural. The history of Wuthering Heights begins after Lockwood seeks an explanation for his ghostly dream and ends with him looking at the three graves of the older generation. Catherine’s ghost does not appear to Heathcliff (who needs and desires to be with it), but to the sensible Lockwood through his wild and vivid dream.

One of the most significant recurrent metaphors in all three Bronte sisters’ work and of the Gothic novel is that of imprisonment, confinement or restraint. Frequent locations in the Gothic are dungeons, secret tunnels and attics where people, usually women, could be imprisoned. This notion of confinement and claustrophobia can be seen as a metaphor for the domestic role of women. In Wuthering Heights both Catherine and Heathcliff (as children) are physically restrained by their elders. As adults they express their longing to escape from the confines of the two houses and from themselves in their desire to die. The sense of claustrophobia is achieved by limiting the action to the Heights and the Grange, with occasional visits to the moors, and through the intermarriages between the Earnshaws and the Lintons, which creates a closed and private world.

In Gothic novels the heroine is usually rescued by the hero, the villain vanquished and the poor and upright hero frequently proves to be the real heir or a prince in disguise. In Wuthering Heights the heroine in need of rescuing is the young Cathy, the villain who has captured her and is keeping her a prisoner is Heathcliff, and the young hero is Hareton, who is of course the real heir to the Heights. But it is not Hareton who sets her free — Heathcliff does this himself by leaving to join the ghostly Catherine. There was a security, when reading a Gothic novel, that order would be restored by the final chapter. The fusion of genres in Wuthering Heights does not allow for this same assurance of restoration.

By the mid nineteenth century the Romantic novel was developing a tougher edge, one that fits better with the move towards Realism. Gothic novels were becoming a thing of the past. Geoff Ward in Romantic Literature From 1790 to 1830 acknowledges this combination when he says, “Much of the interest in the book lies in the brilliant complexity of the structure, the dual narrative, time shifts and flashbacks as well as the original handling of the Gothic and Romantic elements.”

The novel’s strangeness is derived from its unaccustomed settings — the rain-swept Yorkshire moors — and from its extremities of violence and passion. The central portrayal of Catherine and Heathcliff is seen as passionate but without sex — Catherine and Heathcliff never kiss. The realism is strong in its portrayal of violence, marital life, religion, social and class structures. Each of these genre influences is reliant on the other to create a balanced and powerful evocation of rural life in the mid nineteenth century and as a cautionary tale for young women who had read too many Romantic novels.

Bibliography

Allott, Miriam (ed.), Wuthering Heights: A Collection of Critical Essays, Macmillan, 1970 Botting, Fred, Gothic, Routledge, 1996 Drabble, Margaret (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, 1985 Gilbert, Harriett (ed.), The Sexual Imagination, Jonathan Cape, 1993 Hardy, Barbara, Wuthering Heights, Basil Blackwell, 1963 Hawkins, Harriet, Classics and Trash, University of Toronto Press, 1990 Miles, Peter, Wuthering Heights: An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism, Macmillan, 1990 Thomas, Jane (ed.), Victorian Literature 1830 to 1900, Bloomsbury, 1994 Ward, Geoff (ed.), Romantic Literature From 1790 to 1830, Bloomsbury, 1994 Wheeler, Michael, English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890, Longman, 1985