Emerald Fennell’s latest film arrives not as an adaptation so much as an interpretation. 

One drenched in torrential, repugnant passion and unmistakably stamped with her signature strangeness. 

But for admirers of Emily Brontë’s singular novel, this new “Wuthering Heights” teeters precariously between bold reinvention and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the source material endure.

The most jarring departure is Heathcliff himself. 

Casting Jacob Elordi is undeniably a bold choice, but whitening Heathcliff strips away a core part of his identity–his otherness, his outsider status, the racialized tension that fuels the “forbidden” in Catherine and Heathcliff’s forbidden love. 

Without that, the story loses one of its deepest elements. 

The material was there, the actors were there and the gothic ache was there. But the adaptation’s choices often feel like they’re working against the very soul of the novel.

And yet, in a vacuum, if this were not “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell’s film would be a mesmerizing, tear-soaked gothic drama. 

Margot Robbie’s Cathy, surprisingly, works. 

Elordi’s Heathcliff crawling across the floor is enough to send a love-starved theater crowd into a frenzy. 

The modern soundtrack, anchored by moody Charli XCX tracks, electrifies the story in ways no one knew they needed. 

Fennell’s contemporary sensibility is freaky, yes, but undeniably compelling.

But the moment you remember this is Brontë’s story, the cracks widen.

For more than a century, “Wuthering Heights” has been reshaped across film, theater, opera, ballet and beyond. 

Each adaptation pushes and pulls at the novel’s wildness, trying to tame it or modernize it. 

Yet the book resists. 

Its emotional violence, its doubling, its feral lovers. These are the elements that refuse to be neatly contained. Fennell, like many before her, tried anyway.

Her version embraces surrealism, literalism anachronism and a riot of color. 

She bridges past and present with a heavy hand, even adding quotation marks around the title, in an announcement of authorship, to remind viewers that this is her “Wuthering Heights,” not Brontë’s.

The film follows the familiar first half of the novel: young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), wild on the Yorkshire moors, meets Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), the “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” her abusive yet occasionally kind father brings home. 

They grow into playmates, then soul-twisted lovers whose bond is as destructive as it is unbreakable. 

But where the novel’s emotional core is volcanic, this film’s emotional register feels strangely muted beneath the weight of its own excess.

Robbie and Elordi are capable actors, but they’re often swallowed by the sheer spectacle around them. 

Through Catherine’s Met Gala-ready gowns, the acrylic-red floors and the constant costume changes, at times Robbie seems to be playing Barbie again, drifting through a dreamscape rather than a doomed romance. 

Fennell’s vision is undeniably striking. It’s also undeniably hers. But in claiming the story so aggressively, she loses the raw, ungovernable heart of Brontë’s novel.

The result is a film that is gorgeous, feverish and intoxicating — yet ultimately hollow where it matters most.

If you’ve never read the book, you may fall under its spell. If you have, you may find yourself wishing Fennell had trusted the original storm instead of trying to bottle her own.