Wuthering Heights, Withering Lows

Emerald Fennell’s ‘ Wuthering Heights ’ adaptation strips the novel of its racial, regional, and class dynamics, producing an empty spectacle emblematic of the erasure of working-class voices from the arts.

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights. (Credit: Warner Bros.)

In the lead-up to the release of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights , I was sceptical, but not surprised, to see numerous conspiracy theories swirling around the film. Her debut, Promising Young Woman (2020), was a timid rape-revenge that ended with the police belatedly saving the day; Saltburn(2023), her sophomore film, was a ‘class satire’ in which a lecherous Liverpudlian (Barry Keoghan) murders his obscenely wealthy friend Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and, later, most of his family. Understandably, audiences were confused about what Saltburn was trying to say about class and which characters Fennell expected us to sympathise with. But matters were hardly helped by her choice to literally deify Felix, who is killed off while wearing angel wings. Such twists lead Fennell fans to speculate that Wuthering Heights — with its poster’s homage to the 1939 romance film Gone with the Wind , stylised with quotation marks to boot — would be a delightfully kinky adaptation that bore little resemblance, if any at all, to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Sadly, they were wrong.

Any mystery around the film was resolved in January when Penguin published their paperback tie-in. Fennell’s plot was close enough to Brontë’s, though there would be many egregious changes. First, there was Margot Robbie’s woeful miscasting as a teenage Cathy Earnshaw. Then came news that Elordi would play Heathcliff, a character described as an ethnically ambiguous ‘gypsy’ with ‘black eyes’, likened to a ‘Lascar’: sailors most likely from India or Southeast Asia. In the spirit of generosity, it’s possible that Fennell felt that it wasn’t her place to tell Heathcliff’s story (in which case, why adapt Wuthering Heights at all?) or that she wanted to focalise the novel’s class conflict, which she doesn’t do justice to either. Responding to concerns about Elordi’s casting, Fennell explained that her movie wasn’t intended to be a definitive adaptation by any means, just the one she imagined when reading the book as a teenager. The follow-up question this begs — was she unable to picture or feel a ‘profound connection’ to a canonically ‘dark-skinned’ Heathcliff? — has gone scrupulously unanswered.

For accuracy’s sake, let’s be clear that Wuthering Heights is not, as per the film’s tagline, ‘ the greatest love story of all time’. When orphan Heathcliff is brought home from Liverpool (then, a major slave-trade port) by Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes doing his best Boris Johnson), he tells his daughter Cathy that he shall be her pet. A crucial plot in the book hinges on the abuse Heathcliff then endures from Cathy’s bio-brother Hindley — but Fennell, for some inexplicable reason, has conflated his character with Mr. Earnshaw. In this, he abuses both Cathy and Heathcliff, occasionally chiding the latter for being poor. Where Brontë casts Heathcliff’s return as a calculated bid for revenge, Fennell’s film hews tonally closer to a romcom makeover scene.

As a standalone film, Wuthering Heights might be forgiven its sins. Fennell, however, has a track record for mistaking provocation and striking visuals for profundity. Many felt that Saltburn ’s marketing was fiendishly deceptive: it promised The Talented Mr. Ripley(1999) meets Brideshead(1945) and a sharp campus class satire, but delivered fully on neither. The big reveal — that Keoghan’s Oliver, presumed to be a poor orphan, is in fact a middle-class fraud with two living, unremarkable parents — drained the film of whatever narrative momentum it had managed to build. Felix swiftly rejects him, and Oliver embarks on an increasingly elaborate scheme to destroy the Cattons and take over their home. A series of flashbacks then reveal that this was Oliver’s plan all along.

Watching him twirl nude to ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ around the mansion, snorting lines of cocaine, I felt myself growing irrationally angry. This was not a villain I could root for, much less one I could despise. Perhaps Saltburn would have made more sense if Oliver had felt like a discarded charity case. Had he spent the entire summer trying to ingratiate himself into the Catton family, only then to be unceremoniously cast aside, his revenge might have felt psychologically coherent — or, at least, something tangible we could hold against Felix other than the fact he’s quite posh. It would also have rung truer to the kind of class tourism that thrives at universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, and Durham. These are institutions where wealth is fetishised and proximity to it confers social capital, but those from poorer backgrounds can still find themselves alternately exoticised and excluded. Britain’s class problem runs so deep that even Durham, the lone North East outpost among them, has maddeningly had to contend with its own strain of anti-northern prejudice.

Northern antipathy is rife in Fennell’s films, too. Writing in STAT , Ella Fradgley describes her excitement at seeing a Liverpudlian on screen in Saltburn : ‘This is a story I’ve always longed to see represented: how austerity has stolen lives, with all the regional medical neglect, and generational trauma it inflicts on display.’ Yet this promise of authentic representation collapses once Oliver’s true character is revealed. He is deceitful, violent, and willing to steal from the dead: all traits that hew uncomfortably close to The Sun ’s tabloid caricatures of Liverpool’s working-class communities in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster. If Saltburn is truly a story about class, Fradgley writes, then it is little more than ‘a stereotypical, Blairite, middle-class yearning for riches’.

In this sense, Fennell’s Heathcliff reads much like a proto-Oliver. He broods and sulks, but lacks real menace. He is welcome to hang around in the mansion of a rich, mostly kind, family, and the viewer is left with no sense that his background will affect how long he’s there for. Elordi’s questionable accent is the only northern one in the film — a bold move, given that it’s set in West Yorkshire. And Heathcliff’s interest in wealth is presented as entirely unrelated to the middling comforts and threat of poverty he grew up with. The North’s cultural identity and discussions around slavery abolition are all gone.

Absent these and Hindley, everything evil Elordi’s Heathcliff does in service of his obsession with pseudo-sibling Cathy. It’s a shame, then, that he has no real chemistry with Robbie. The erotic deviance of Brontë’s novel is there in large part because Cathy and Heathcliff never consummate their love. Instead, Fennell offers us a romping montage set to Charli xcx. The appalling acts of violence, torture, sexual abuse, and kidnapping Heathcliff commits have been substituted here for some light sub-dom roleplay with Isabella Linton (a scene-stealing Alison Oliver). During their first (pre-marital) sexual encounter, he outlines his plan for revenge but continuously asks for consent before going any further. It’s as if Fennell cannot bear to make Elordi do anything untoward, even if it betrays Heathcliff’s entire character.

Worse still is Wuthering Heights ’ empty Northern soul. The Moors scenes, filmed on the Dales, feel too tame and bright. The townsfolk only feature briefly; when they do, they are ‘sexual deviants’ who get off at the sight of a hanging man’s post-mortem erection. While Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are immaculately designed, the surrounding land and town feel so generic that Fennell’s film might as well be set anywhere in Victorian Britain.

None of this is to suggest we need to be purists about adaptation, though. Done well, a film’s infidelity to its source material matters less than the cohesion of the final product, and some books are, without drastic intervention, unfilmable for good reason. Nor must every film be made by someone who shares their characters’ lived experience.

Still, I think it certainly helps when a director has an emotional stake in the story they are telling. While there’s no need for me to rehash specifics of Fennell’s background — widely the subject of criticism during Saltburn ’s press run — it is, perhaps, worth asking whether it has limited her feel for satire and class commentary here. Wuthering Heights ’ misfires aren’t inconsequential because they entrench a climate already stacked against the North and working classes. While Reform proposes relentless attacks on workers’ rights and public services, Labour strays farther from its unionist roots with each passing day. And with funding for Northern arts institutions already lagging behind London and the South, the film offers no redress: not a single local appears in the main cast. In future films, Fennell would do better to stray from class politics and focus on what she knows best: revenge, debasement, and transgression, if substantiated by more than just glittering, empty provocation.