There is something fascinating about watching a film that the internet has already decided to hate. By the time Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reached cinemas, the hostility had been building for almost two years. The backlash began the moment the project was announced, intensified when Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi were cast as Catherine and Heathcliff, and exploded when the trailer appeared online.
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Critics attacked everything: the casting, the costumes, the accents, the soundtrack, the wedding dress, the erotic tone. Even the title was controversial. Not Wuthering Heights, but “Wuthering Heights”, quotation marks included, as if to underline that this version belongs to Fennell rather than to Emily Brontë. The hostility has been relentless.
But when I went to see it in the cinema with a friend, the experience felt strangely different from the internet narrative. Two women were sitting next to us, and they spent most of the film whispering their disappointment. Every scene triggered a comparison. That isn’t how it happens in the book. The 1992 version did it better. This isn’t faithful. It was like sitting beside two curators guarding a literary monument. And yet, on screen, the film was doing something far less solemn. It was having fun.
There is something fascinating about watching a film that the internet has already decided to hate.
This is what the discourse around “Wuthering Heights” seems to miss. The film is not pretending to be a definitive interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. It is closer to a flamboyant, chaotic remix. The quotation marks around the title signal exactly that: this is a Wuthering Heights, not the Wuthering Heights. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi immediately push the story into a different cultural register. Their presence carries the energy of contemporary celebrity rather than Victorian literature. Catherine and Heathcliff stop behaving like sacred literary figures and start looking like volatile icons from modern pop mythology.
Catherine especially transforms in this version. Margot Robbie’s performance moves closer to a glamorous modern antihero than to the tragic Victorian heroine readers often imagine. Her Catherine feels impulsive, unpredictable, occasionally ridiculous, and completely watchable. The same applies to the film’s aesthetic choices. The costumes have been mocked relentlessly online, especially Catherine’s wedding dress, which many critics insist looks decades out of place. But that slightly anachronistic feeling is exactly what makes the film visually interesting. The clothes feel closer to emotional styling than to historical reconstruction. Catherine looks as if she belongs simultaneously to the nineteenth century and to a fashion campaign.
This is a Wuthering Heights, not the Wuthering Heights.
Then there is the music. Few things angered the internet more than the discovery that Charli XCX appears on the soundtrack. For purists, this was proof that the film had abandoned all historical integrity. But hearing contemporary music collide with the Brontë universe actually produces something strangely effective. The emotional chaos of Wuthering Heights suddenly feels closer to modern pop melodrama than to heritage cinema. Which, honestly, makes sense.
Emily Brontë’s novel is not polite. Catherine and Heathcliff behave like emotional weather systems. Their love story is obsessive, destructive, irrational, and occasionally cruel. The polite, fog-covered prestige adaptations that came before often soften this violence. Fennell’s version leans into it. Of course, the internet had already decided that the film represented some kind of cultural crime.
Certain novels eventually become cultural property. Readers feel protective toward them, as if adaptation were a form of trespassing.
Part of that reaction has more to do with Emerald Fennell than with the movie itself. Ever since Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, she has become a director who provokes strong reactions. Her style is flamboyant, visually aggressive, and unapologetically theatrical. For some critics, that sensibility feels incompatible with the reverence traditionally given to Brontë. But reverence is exactly the problem.
— Emerald Fennell (@emeraldfennell) July 12, 2024
Certain novels eventually become cultural property. Readers feel protective toward them, as if adaptation were a form of trespassing. Wuthering Heights is one of those books people encounter in adolescence, during the most emotionally impressionable stage of life. For many readers, Heathcliff becomes the prototype of toxic romantic obsession. The story fuses itself to their personal memory. Any reinterpretation therefore feels like an attack on that memory. Which explains the fury surrounding “Wuthering Heights”. The debate has very little to do with whether the film works as cinema. It has to do with whether a classic should be allowed to change.
Maybe the point of adaptation isn’t accuracy at all.
Watching the film in a crowded theater makes that tension visible. Some viewers clearly want a museum piece: foggy moors, faithful costumes, tragic lovers speaking in literary tones. What Fennell delivers instead is something messier, more stylized, occasionally outrageous. But it is also entertaining. And that might be the most radical thing about it.
Cinema, after all, is supposed to be fun. The experience of watching “Wuthering Heights” in a theater, surrounded by murmuring skeptics, critics, and fans, feels oddly exhilarating. The film might not satisfy literary purists, but it moves, shocks, seduces, and irritates in equal measure. Which is probably closer to the spirit of Emily Brontë than endless reverence.
Cinema, after all, is supposed to be fun.
Because the novel itself was not polite Victorian entertainment. It was wild, obsessive, and deeply strange. Catherine and Heathcliff behave like forces of nature, not characters designed to teach moral lessons. In that sense, the chaotic energy of “Wuthering Heights” feels strangely appropriate.
The internet may continue to argue about casting, costumes, accents, and Charli XCX. The discourse will probably last months. But inside a cinema, away from social media commentary, the film reveals itself as something much simpler.
Not a sacred text.
Just a loud, messy, visually striking movie that is actually pretty fun to watch.
