Let’s Talk About “Wuthering Heights”—What Really Matters in a Film Adaptation?

Whether through Instagram, TikTok, or otherwise, everyone has heard about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation—or, perhaps more accurately, about the debates this movie has sparked.

Going into my English degree at Carleton, Wuthering Heights was one of my favourite novels. After reading it five times now, I still feel that there are hidden layers which I discover on every re-read. So, upon hearing that there was going to be an adaptation, I was both excited and terrified. After watching the movie, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, I was honestly conflicted.

Yes, the movie stripped much of Emily Brontë’s complexity, but I also can’t say that I hated it.

I think that this is central to the debate surrounding the movie—people who hate it, hate it because it was an unfaithful representation of Wuthering Heights, but a lot of people also enjoyed the movie because of its cinematography. So, what really matters? 

I spoke to Paul Keen, a Professor at Carleton University who specializes in Romantic literature, and he thought that if you are going to make a movie adaptation, you may as well play with it—use the medium to adapt and mold the text, so that it is relevant to today’s audience. An example of this is the 1996 Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann. While it departs from Shakespeare’s original script, it is an intentional departure. While the family rivalry is accentuated and stretched to become ‘gang’ violence, the spirit of the play is still present. And this is what Keen believes is important: If the text held meaningful political or cultural commentary (important enough that it still remains relevant to today), then we don’t want to lose that. So, did we?

Immediately, a layer of the novel was stripped in the decision to remove Nelly as the unbiased narrator and to end the movie halfway through the novel. However, this is not what the conversations surrounding the adaptation have centered on. Inevitably, in today’s cultural climate, our debates tend to revolve around the big three of contemporary politics: class, race, and sexualization. As Keen puts it, “Wuthering Heights’ account of the doomed relationship between a well-off local girl and the menacing ‘dark’ orphan brought into their mix speaking ‘some gibberish that nobody could understand’ makes these questions inevitable.”

In the novel, Brontë creates nuanced class dynamics, which director Emerald Fennell has been criticized for excluding. Keen highlights that all the characters in the movie have working class accents, which already removes a layer of complexity and historical accuracy—Catherine, as a daughter of local gentry, would not have had the same accent as Nelly and Heathcliff. However, I would argue that, while complexity was lost, the movie did not strip the book entirely of its class dynamics but rather explored it through a more contemporary lens—such as Catherine’s gaudy, ‘over-the-top,’ costumes. 

One of the critiques of Fennell’s adaptation was that she chose to cast a white man as Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff’s background is unclear. The fact that he is twice referred to as a “gypsy” reinforces both the racialized aspect of Heathcliff’s background and the ambiguity this implied. “Gypsy” referred in its most formal sense to the Romani people, but it tended to be used more broadly as a slur on anyone who was not quite English, or not English enough. The concerns surrounding Fennell “whitewashing” Wuthering Heights then, are not entirely unfounded, as Heathcliff is the epitome of the threatening Other—an individual who would not have been white in the English sense of the word. 

Finally, Fennell received backlash for the overtly sexual nature of the movie. This is where I would argue that the movie completely strays from the book. As Keen explains, the novel belongs to the gothic genre, a genre which is about unfulfilled desire. It is a genre about thwarted desire, it is about impossibilities, it explores where this desire comes from, exposing a ‘lack’ in the self that can only be fulfilled through the Other, and instead of this desire actualizing, it becomes a destructive and malevolent force (which is very obvious in the novel).

So, by Catherine and Heathcliff acting on this desire in the movie, Fennell completely ignores the premise of the gothic and, in turn, erases these complexities. 

So, again, I come back to this question of whether we completely lost the spirit of the text. Here, I would like to consider one final detail. CBC explains that the movie is meant to be “a re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn director had reading the book as a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old.” When I read this, the lack of complexity in the movie suddenly made complete sense. I was fourteen when I first read the book, and all of which I have just discussed went completely over my head. Leaving the movie theatre, I felt the way I did when I first read the novel—a deep devastation for these two characters whose choices lead them on a path of self-destruction. Sure, as a twenty-two-year-old English major, I can now read the book and understand how interesting this novel is in its historical context and narrative choices, but when I was fourteen? Not so much. 

So, yes, I do believe the political and cultural debates of the novel were, for the most part, lost in adaptation. However, in some ways, I believe the spirit of the novel (perhaps only in its emotional provocation) was captured, which is why I left the movie theatre so conflicted. And I was not alone in my confliction. One critic expressed that, “in spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.” Another argued that Wuthering Heights “baffl[es] all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about.” These reviews were published in 1847, and here we are, in 2026, still having similar debates, still not knowing quite what to do with this story. Perhaps this is what makes a faithful adaptation impossible. 

Whether you hated or loved the movie, I believe something we can all agree on is the power of literature, and stories more broadly. Here is a book from 1847, which remains relevant to today and is still fueling debate. That, in the world of an English major, is the ultimate take-away.