Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
There are no rules, get as crazy as you want, work your own variations, even if the raw material is an acknowledged classic. Let the marketplace decide, etc. etc. Still, there is one thing that Emerald Fennell's deliberately out-there adaptation of Emily Brontë is pretty much obliged to get right, and I think the movie flubs it.
That is: to establish the torrid and to-the-death bond between Cathy and Heathcliff, which we then understand completely as the story's permutations go ahead and, uh, permutate. I recently re-watched the Wyler-Goldwyn Wuthering Heights from 1939, and while it is certainly a Hollywoodization of the material, it is also admirable in its studio-era craft. This includes Gregg Toland's superb cinematography and the uncanny way some Southern California ranchland becomes Yorkshire, but also the basic screenwriting business of getting the two main characters obsessed with each other from their childhood introduction. It is shorthand, and it is sometimes corn, but it cements the bond as insoluble.
You'd think this would be easy to achieve, and then Fennell could uncork her wilder ideas. But her "Wuthering Heights" portrays the youthful Cathy and Heathcliff (and even for a while the adult C&H, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi) as playful, teasing, prone to a suspiciously 2026-era kind of smack-talking-as-flirtation. This does not add up to Romanticism with a capital R. The movie has a draggy rhythm, and as I was wondering at various times "Why is this scene here, and why is it taking so long?" I also wondered how Fennell was not able to spend a couple of the film's 136 minutes locking down its central l'amour fou.
You might answer, well, the leads are played by Robbie and Elordi, and often in close-up, so who needs any other foundation? Maybe. But as devoted as Robbie is to the part—and she gives the best performance in the film—she carries level-headedness with her. She's the movie's producer, and the person on screen comes across as a very capable movie producer. (Merle Oberon, in the '39 film, was also held back by a certain too-prettiness, but at least she went credibly bonkers at the end, writhing in Laurence Olivier's arms as they gaze out the window toward their phallic trysting place on the moors.) Elordi, who was touching in Frankenstein, can't Heathcliff it. His face is handsome but insipid; his Frankenstein's monster seemed more alert and passionate. When Heathcliff must exercise psycho-sexual degradation on others, it doesn't ring true.
I buried the lede here, because what people will talk about when they talk about Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" is the degree of kinky invention Fennell has added to her version. Some of this is effective, some flat. One scene in which Heathcliff forcefully seduces Cathy's eager sister-in-law Isabella (Alison Oliver) plays as a near-parody of safe-space romance ("Do you want me to stop?" Heathcliff keeps asking, as he proceeds with the deflowering). That's Fennell at her naughty best, finding unexpected notes of transgression and satire within a story.
I liked her first two films, but "Wuthering Heights" is an experiment that founders. Fennell may have wanted to revise ideas about gender and class and romance by vamping on a classic, but the Brontë novel hardly needed adjusting or correcting for, you know, these times. And if it is going to play as a burnin' love update, then it could at least move along a little—less diddling, more wuthering.
February 13, 2026
