Emerald Fennell’s Haunting Take On Wuthering Heights Stuns

I watched Wuthering Heights alone in an empty theater on the west side of town — a small mercy, because by the final scene I was crying like a baby.

It had been more than a decade since I read the novel by Emily Brontë, first published in 1847 — a book often mislabeled as a love story when it is, in truth, something far more feral. Memory had softened it for me. Time had turned its brutality into mist.

Director Emerald Fennell burns that mist away.

Fennell — known to many for her acting roles in Call the Midwife and The Crown — does not deliver a polite period drama with sweeping strings and reverent camera pans over corsets. Her Wuthering Heights is grotesquely beautiful, tactile to the point of discomfort. It insists that we feel the damp wool, the mud-caked hems, the suffering in every glance.

There is a moment — a now-infamous “corset lift” — that encapsulates Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond: possessive, carnal, violent. It is not courtship. It is collision.

Fennell confronts us with flesh. She zooms in on snail slime streaking across a rain-soaked windowpane. Catherine absently pushes her finger into a gelatin mold, a dead fish suspended inside it, staring blankly upward. The camera lingers too long for comfort. Beauty decays under scrutiny.

The walls of Catherine’s bedroom are the same pallid shade as her skin. Her beauty mark is echoed in the fabric around her, as if the room itself is branded. The message is not subtle: her body is both currency and cage.

And then there is gluttony — rendered with an almost biblical clarity. An alcoholic drinks himself into a swollen, rotting ruin. Catherine’s silks and jewels feel no less toxic. Consumption here is not indulgence; it is self-destruction dressed as aspiration.

Fennell understands something many adaptations ignore: *Wuthering Heights* is not about yearning for a soulmate. It is about obsession as corrosion. About class as violence. About what happens when desire is denied oxygen and forced to grow in the dark.

The film’s genius lies in refusing to romanticize what Brontë wrote as ruin. Heathcliff is not a misunderstood heartthrob. Catherine is not a whimsical ingénue. They are, instead, mirrors — reflecting the ugliest parts of each other until there is nothing left but distortion.

Sitting in that empty theater, I realized why the story still unsettles us nearly two centuries later. It exposes the lie at the center of so many love stories: that intensity equals intimacy. That suffering proves devotion. That possession is passion.

Fennell does not let us hide in those lies. She hands us mud instead of moors-as-wallpaper. She gives us sweat, spit, pain, and rot. She dares to suggest that the prison is not the windswept estate, but the human body — and the social structures that confine it.