Deviation as Devotion: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”

By Ellie Somers

“Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences […] of a sort of rugged power—an unconscious strength—which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage.” [1]

While the aforementioned quote may easily be mistaken as an utterance from one of countless Letterboxd warriors denouncing Emerald Fennell’s divisive adaptation (which has an ever-fluctuating 2.9/5 average rating on the platform), it is really a comment on its now-revered source material, Emily Brontë’s sole and seminal novel, from its time of publishing in 1847. Such outrage, it seems, is hereditary.

Condemnation or prophecy?

It is a perplexing phenomenon, then, that nearly 200 years later, we must bear witness to more of the same scepticism. A deluge of internet discourse seems to reach shore hand-in-hand with each of Fennell’s directorial pursuits. Her sophomore feature, louche black comedy thriller Saltburn (2023), exhibited a peculiar train-wreck sort of quality, leaving viewers conflicted with not wanting to watch yet being unable to look away. One to be watched through splayed fingers, I propose.

It was on the set of Saltburn that Fennell first laid eyes on her Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), a selection which would prove contentious amongst those familiar with the original despite her justification that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that [she] read”. In the novel, Heathcliff is insistently Other. His exact ethnic origin is left ambiguous, first described as a “dark-skinned gipsy”, later, “as white as the wall behind him”. [2] Some scholars even argue for Heathcliff’s identity as being Irish. It would make for an interesting parallel, considering the Brontë children’s own upbringing. Born to an Irish father (Patrick Brunty, who formally gentrified the spelling later in life), they spent their childhood being cared for by an aunt in West Yorkshire who dissuaded them from speaking in their native Irish accents for fear of discrimination. Similarly, Heathcliff arrives in Yorkshire from another land and is discouraged from the “gibberish” he speaks, as it purports a “wild” character.

Opposite Elordi, Robbie understands that Catherine Earnshaw possesses an adolescent ego, combusting expectation again. Here lies one of the film’s most intriguing tensions. In the novel, teenage Cathy’s destructiveness is inseparable from her youth. As is the grandiosity of first obsession, the delusion that love must be catastrophically whole or nothing at all. On screen, she is aged up, her father declaring she is past spinsterhood before ever receiving Edgar Linton’s marriage proposal. This shift subtly alters the stakes, in spite of Robbie’s convincing performance. When such fixation is attributed to a teenager, there’s a certain tragedy in her naïveté. When it belongs to an adult, it curdles differently. How could she know better? becomes but why doesn’t she?

A feast for the senses

As with Saltburn, beauty and grotesquerie entwine so that they are indistinguishable. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s visual architecture. The cinematography is sumptuous to the point of delirium. Every frame is carefully composed with devotional excess. The moors brood, much like their inhabitants, in a series of operatic greys; candlelit interiors pulse like living organs.

Thrushcross Grange, in particular, is rendered as a surreal fever palace. Decadent and faintly obscene rooms spill across the stately home, Cathy’s bedroom walls adorned with enlarged scans of Robbie’s own face, veins magnified, and flesh abstracted into pattern. Outlandish and hypnotic. Here, desire is tactile (even dermatological).

Adaptation versus re-enactment

Uncertainty over Fennell’s adaptation is, of course, defensible. My qualm lies with surface-level speculation clouding much of the criticism surrounding “Wuthering Heights”, stylised with quotation marks as a note of Fennell’s own humility to her singular and limited rendition. A great deal of backlash hinges on a single complaint: that Fennell has betrayed the original text. Yet this argument seems to betray its own confusion. Wuthering Heights has never been safe. It was unruly in 1847. It remains so now. To adapt anything (particularly material as rich as Brontë’s) is to commit an act of interpretation as opposed to an act of ventriloquism. By demanding transcription, you misinterpret the medium. That Fennell’s version inspires derision, even moral suspicion, feels appropriate. Certainly, the novel endures not because of its stability but its volatility.

Is all of this to say that I agree with every creative decision made? Not in the slightest. Do certain alterations raise critical questions about race, age, and agency? Without a doubt. I applaud Fennell’s position as a provocateur in contemporary cinema, and cinema that refuses to risk such discomfort, I would contend, is cinema already half-dead. Instead of embalming Brontë’s ambition, Fennell seizes it, contorting and staining it with her own aesthetic fingerprints.

The result is not a masterpiece as much as it is a provocation.

I, for one, suspect Emily Brontë would have understood that perfectly.

★ ★ ★ ★

References

[1] Anonymous. The Atlas. London, January 22, 1848.

[2] Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1847.

Fennell, Emerald, director. “Wuthering Heights”. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2026. 2 hr., 16 min.