Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has been released worldwide. Film critic Katya Stepnaya argues that the director deliberately abandoned fidelity to Emily Bronte’s novel and turned the material into a campy erotic melodrama.
In the film, Mr. Earnshaw brings a ragged boy to the estate, and Cathy names him Heathcliff. They grow up together, but only he is punished for their shared misdeeds. Later, the adult Cathy chooses the more advantageous match of Edgar, while her attraction to Heathcliff remains central to their painful bond. After an intimate encounter, he disappears, and Cathy tries to accept a wife’s role that clearly does not suit her.
Stepnaya writes that the press reacted with confusion: the title and marketing suggested a respectful adaptation of a classic, but Fennell opted for satire, kitsch, and postmodern license. The film cuts off around the middle of the book, omits the children and inheritance conflicts, and removes or radically alters many secondary characters.
According to the critic, judging this version by standards of literary or historical accuracy makes little sense. The film’s visual world is built on deliberate artificiality: estates are tiled, bedrooms are draped in plastic, and characters slide across a red mirrored floor. In her view, the director is less interested in the novel’s social themes than in lust, wounded pride, and the characters’ painful dependence on one another.
In this interpretation, class difference becomes not just a social problem but a source of erotic charge. The camera emphasizes physicality: the characters breathe into each other, scratch, bite, and fall into the mud. Stepnaya notes that nearly every intimate scene is paired with aggression, and that the film consciously borrows from the language of erotic cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.
At the same time, she argues that the film lacks true transgression: it remains comparatively safe for viewers and avoids genuinely disturbing imagery. Robbie plays Catherine as a cold and commanding figure, while Elordi is framed above all as a highly sexualized screen presence. According to the article, the film earned 80 million dollars in its opening weekend against an equal budget, which the critic sees as evidence that its creators accurately read audience moods at the end of the winter of 2026.