Kate Bush sang about it. Monty Python satirised it. Cliff Richard even turned it into a terrible stage musical. Emily Brontë’sWuthering Heights, the classic tale of doomed love and revenge, has inspired countless adaptations ranging from the terrific to the terrible.
Director William Wyler was the first to bring the story to life on film, casting Laurence Olivier as a brooding, capital “R” Romantic Heathcliff, the novel’s tortured antihero. In 1967, the BBC version featured a chiselled Ian McShane alongside Angela Scoular as Cathy. The 90s saw Sinéad O’Connor star as Brontë herself in a meta take on the dual narrator, while Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version was praised for casting a black actor as Heathcliff and tackling head-on the novel’s contested treatment of race.
Cinema has enjoyed a long love affair with this dense, disturbing, complicated, enduring text. Every generation has its adaptation – one that captures the zeitgeist and speaks to the prevailing moods, trends, fashions and attitudes of the time. No wonder then, that our Wuthering Heights, or, sorry, “Wuthering Heights”, is so divisive. And dumb.
Wuthering-lite
Ever since the first trailer was released in late 2025, Saltburn director Emerald Fennell’s vision of Brontë’s gothic romance has been controversial. There’s been much pearl-clutching about fidelity to the novel, and book purists have spurned Fennell as some kind of heretic for daring to rip up the rulebook. From the casting of Aussies Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi to the anachronistic costumes and aggressively sexual overtones, no detail has been spared the critics’ wrath.
So it was hard to keep an open mind while watching it. But reserve judgement I did, despite being thoroughly tested by some thoroughly ridiculous scenes (namely, oozing egg yolks; a woman being tied up with a bridle; a bedroom with wallpaper made of skin).
There are countless superlatives I could use, but at its core, the film is a bonkfest. A trashy, high-camp, maximalist fever dream. It’s an adaptation for our post-Bridgerton world, where the period drama has burst free from its tightly laced corset and now must be bolder, louder and, most importantly, raunchier. It’s so far from the novel that Fennell quite rightly put the title in quotation marks.
I’m not really concerned about whether the film’s a faithful or a traitor, or even how many stars it deserves. What’s more interesting is how little it says about anything, underneath all the frills and thrills, and even though it’s derived from some of the richest source material in our literary canon.
