Not quite Brontë: Emerald Fennell’s fevered vision of Wuthering Heights | The Express Tribune
Adapting a classic like Wuthering Heights is never a gentle exercise. The novel is revered as a tempest of obsession, cruelty, longing, and inherited grief. Emerald Fennell’s interpretation does not aim for faithful transcription; instead, it drenches the tale in intensity and asks a daring question: what if this story were not just read, but viscerally felt?
For those avid Brontë fans willing to loosen their grip on strict fidelity, the film offers something compelling — a strikingly immersive and carefully curated vision that asserts its own identity.
A different beginning, a different tone
Brontë’s novel famously begins with absence: Cathy (Margot Robbie) is already dead, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) hardened by time, and the housekeeper Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) narrates the story from memory. Fennell, on the other hand, opens with young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) witnessing a public hanging and young Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) enduring Cathy’s father’s abuse. It’s dramatic, gruesome, and confrontational — Fennell immediately signals that this will not be a museum piece adaptation.
The restructuring of the film helps simplify certain psychological layers.
Cathy’s father is now the source of household cruelty, replacing her brother Hindley’s jealousy. Nelly, usually an observer, becomes an agent of separation, letting Heathcliff overhear Cathy’s rejection and later burning their love letters. Heathcliff’s violence is also heightened, including coercing Isabella into marriage and a disturbing scene tying her to the fireplace.
In the novel, these characters behave cruelly, but in different ways: Nelly eventually helps Heathcliff reconnect with Cathy, and Isabella escapes the torturous marriage.
These changes transform ambiguous cruelty into explicit manipulations, heightening emotional stakes and making the story more immediate and cinematic for modern viewers. Fennell clearly favors intense layered drama.
Intimacy at the surface
One of the boldest departures in the film’s treatment is physical intimacy. Brontë’s book often simmered with sensuality but rarely approached it in a direct context. Fennell, however, makes the movie physically intimate and inviting.
Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff embodies that philosophy. He remarked during a press conference that the intimacy portrayed is “entirely in the spirit of the novel”.
His interpretation that Cathy and Heathcliff’s intimate bond was intensely elemental — “It’s the blood that pumps through the heart, and his blood, to him, is Cathy’s blood”, says Elordi.
Language of red
Another of the film’s most striking elements is its use of the color red.
It appears subtly at first — a ribbon in Cathy’s hair, then deepens to a skirt, a hallway, and the blood in Heathcliff’s early beating. The camera often lingers on scars, bruised skin, and flushed cheeks, merging flesh and fabric in a poetic and grotesque way.
When Cathy walks through pig’s blood before approaching the Lintons estate, the imagery foreshadows the violence and loss that will define her faith. In Brontë’s novel, Cathy dies from complications in childbirth; Fennell re-images her death as sepsis, an infection that spreads through the bloodstream itself.
The last scene ends with Heathcliff running down a corridor bathed in red light, reaching Cathy’s pale grey form — a sharp contrast to the intensity of love.
Red in this film is more than a color: it symbolises violence, puberty and awakening, intimacy, infection, and loss.
The use of the color might be melodramatic — but that is intentional. The film insists that it is love that bleeds.
A look into the details
The movie also pays meticulous attention to detail, from set designs to glamour. When Cathy marries Edgar (Shazad Latif) and moves to Thrushcross Grange, opulence replaces the wildness of Wuthering Heights: glittering glassware, expensive banquets, fish displayed in decorative vases, and amongst an unsettling dollhouse that echoes the cruelty around her.
Costume designer Jacqueline Duran captures these contrasts perfectly. Cathy (Margot Robbie) flourishes in skin-tight corsets, luminous velvet skirts, and extravagant jewels. Her clothing represents both status and constraint — she appears to choose her path, yet in doing so, sacrifices her wild, untamed spirit.
Finally: the divide
Devoted readers may miss Brontë’s original narration and the way generational consequences shape the novel’s quieter, more insidious brutality. However, the film’s embrace of dark humor is precisely what makes it engaging.
Though it may leave some viewers frustrated, the lush cinematography does not mirror the 1847 text; instead, it distills the gruesome tale into something immediate and visceral for modern cinema.
Fennell may not replicate Brontë’s storm, but she sets it ablaze in her own way.
