Is Wuthering Heights (2026) Woke? | VirtueVigil Review

Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights is a bold, frequently beautiful, and ultimately frustrating adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel. It arrives with the full force of prestige filmmaking behind it: gorgeous Yorkshire moors cinematography, two movie stars at the height of their physical appeal, composer Carter Burwell finding the ache in every scene, and a director whose commitment to her vision is never in question. The problem is the vision itself.

Fennell has stated she wanted to recreate the feeling of a teenage girl encountering Bronte for the first time, that rush of forbidden wanting, the sense that Heathcliff is somehow both monster and magnetic north. As a stated goal it is not without merit. The novel does operate on that frequency. But translating the feeling of adolescent literary fantasy into a two-hour film for adult audiences requires more than beautiful photography of brooding faces on windswept hills.

Jacob Elordi gives a performance that partially justifies the enterprise. His Heathcliff is physically imposing, emotionally coiled, and capable of projecting the kind of specific damage that makes a romantic obsessive plausible rather than cartoonish. When the film rests on him, it breathes. Margot Robbie is not badly cast so much as she is badly written. The script gives Catherine enormous wants and almost no inner life. She desires, she rages, she suffers, but the film never locates what she actually believes about anything beyond Heathcliff. Without that interiority, her choices register as passion without consequence, which flatters the character in ways Bronte never intended.

The hyper-sexual presentation generated the most controversy. The film earned its R rating, and the content is genuinely heavy: multiple explicit scenes, physical violence between lovers treated as erotic rather than alarming, and a tonal refusal to judge anything Catherine wants. Parents should treat the R rating with full seriousness. This is not an adaptation to casually hand to a teenager who loved the novel in English class.

Fennell's feminist reframing also runs into a structural problem that no amount of craft can solve. Wuthering Heights endures because Bronte treats Heathcliff's toxicity as genuinely toxic. He destroys everyone he touches, including himself. The novel offers no romantic exit from that. Fennell's version wants to honor the want while gesturing at the danger, which produces a film that neither fully condemns the relationship nor earns the right to celebrate it. The result is beautiful and empty.

Martin Clunes as Mr. Earnshaw and Ewan Mitchell as the destructive Hindley earn the film's best reviews in supporting roles, bringing behavioral specificity to characters the script mostly treats as plot machinery. Hong Chau as Nelly Dean is a calm center in scenes that need one.

The film made real money: $77 million globally in its opening weekend, which suggests the target audience of readers who grew up with the novel responded to something here even if critics did not. That audience knows what they are buying. The VirtueVigil concern is not that the film is bad, though it is more miss than hit, but that it presents a relationship defined by mutual destruction as the most alive thing its protagonists ever experience, without providing the moral architecture to contextualize that claim.