This article contains Wuthering Heights spoilers (as well as for Frankenstein and Dune).

Emerald Fennell’s relationship to Emily Brontë appears to be an estranged and distant thing. The Millennial iconoclast who once filmed Barry Keoghan getting intimate with the grave of his lost love in Saltburn would at a glance seem perfect for the English author’s portrait of multigenerational degradation. What is Wuthering Heights if not an godseyed view of several great houses slowly falling to ruin, which becomes complete when the Byronic antihero Heathcliff likewise digs up the remains of his great love? It’s about clinging tightly to the past until you’re in the ground with it.

Curiously though, that is not the movie Fennell chose to make. As was initially hinted by the filmmaker and Warner Brothers cheekily bringing back the title quotes on posters favored by Golden Age Hollywood publicity departments—think one-sheets for Gone with the Wind (1939), Warners’ own Casablanca (1942), or even William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights circa ’39—this “Wuthering Heights” is an unapologetic reinterpretation; a deviation; an outright reevaluation, even, which took the basic outline of Brontë’s story and reframed it in a narrative that better represented the themes Fennell wanted to explore: lust, love, and the maximalist ecstasy of a soul set free.

In my review of the film, I suggested it felt less like a 19th century story about tragic longing and repressed desires curdling into hate than it is a teenage daydream ocurring while listening to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (also with the quotation marks) and imagining what the book is about. That apparently was not too far off the mark. In several interviews, Fennell has talked about coming to the novel at 14 years old and feeling transformed by its effect on her mind. She even said, “I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real. So there’s a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

That tracks since so much of Fennell’s film deliberately evokes a fevered dream and the artifice of cinema classics of yore. There are the old Hollywood flourishes but also bits of surrealism, German Expressionism, and imagery that might look at home in a music video for the aforementioned Kate Bush. And whether you love Fennell’s indulgent sense of artifice, or find it simplistic since it glorifies a romance between two people who remain genuinely awful—with Cathy still played with self-absorbed vanity by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff staying gloomily transfixed by his grudges and hatreds for everyone around him—it is nevertheless a valid work of art from an artist who chased her own muses.

Yet so much of the criticism I have seen directed toward Wuthering Heights 2026, and Fennell in particular, seems less concerned about engaging with what she put onscreen than what she left out. Admittedly there are missed opportunities worth acknowledging. The loss of the central ghost story framework of the tale robs Cathy and Heathcliff’s doomed and damnable love story of some of its ethereal charm, as well as oblique perversity. Also while Heathcliff’s racial background is intentionally ambiguous on the page, refusing to let Heathcliff to appear as a changeling perceived as the “other” within the strictures of the landed English gentry deprives the story of the 19th century imperial desires and anxieties that Brontë exploited.

While Australian Elordi’s Heathcliff is lily white, Fennell intriguingly takes a “color-blind casting” approach to the characters who would seek to cast Heathcliff out into the cold: the rich aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and Nelly (Hong Chau). The latter is Cathy’s maid and confidant who, in Fennell’s telling, proves to be as duplicitous as any of them. It is, in fact, this Nelly who deliberately betrays Cathy and Heathcliff’s trust at various points. Yet this shift does not evidently court any commentary on perceptions of race in Britain at the height of imperialism. Rather it seems designed to push the film further into the realm of distant fairy tale, where it is as divorced from a historical time and place as Cathy’s plunging necklines.

To critique the changes, or find them inferior, is fair game. But the vast majority of discourse around this Wuthering Heights seems specifically derived from the personal umbrage that the changes exist at all. The narrative seems less about whether Fennell made a good movie and instead that she had the audacity to make a movie tailored to her own tastes instead of that of English literature departments.

“Everyone hates the new Wuthering Heights trailer, and here’s why,” The Spinoff published five months before the movie came out. “Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is objectively not Wuthering Heights,” opined CBC in a review that suggests the film’s changes are so head-scratching that they may eventually “lead to a brain injury.” Collider, not unfairly, surmised that Brontë is “rolling in her grave.”

Brontë probably is, to which I ask… so what?!

Why does it matter so much that Emerald Fennell personally deviated from an oft-adapted novel to craft her own maximalist fantasia? She is not the first filmmaker to take striking liberties with Brontë. In fact, it was not until the 2011 Andrea Arnold miniseries starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson that a major adaptation attempted to cover the full multigenerational breadth of the book. Until then, most followed William Wyler’s lead from the classic 1939 Hollywood version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon by ending the story with Cathy’s death and Heathcliff’s plea she haunt him forevermore. Arnold’s miniseries also holds the distinction of being the first version to cast a Black actor as Heathcliff. Still, before and after we’ve had Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, and Timothy Dalton, among others, play Heathcliff, and films like the ‘39 version which conspicuously soften Cathy’s selfishness or Heathcliff’s sadism.

Beyond Wuthering Heights, some of the most celebrated films of the last few years have taken just as much, if not greater, liberty with their source materials. Jacob Elordi indeed stars in another of them via Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeously realized vision of Frankenstein, for which Elordi might very well win an Oscar. His and del Toro’s interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Creature is full of pathos and elegant acting choices. They also choose to intentionally downplay the Creature’s flaws and failings. Hence in del Toro’s film, it is Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) who accidentally kills the woman he is in love with instead of the Creature cruelly and deliberately murdering Elizabeth on her wedding night to Victor.

Similarly, the year before, nerd culture generally was in geek cinema nirvana when Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two ended in tragedy as the Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) refuses to accept Paul Atreides’ wedding betrothal to a galactic princess as a political necessity. Instead she sees Timothée Chalamet’s Paul for the burgeoning tyrant most book-readers miss entirely when they finish Frank Herbert’s first Dune volume on the high of Paul defeating his enemies, and Chani happily accepting her lot as Paul’s concubine.

These are just a few of far more significant structural changes made both by del Toro and Villeneuve, whose shifts ran the gamut from changing the location and period (Frankenstein on the page is set in late 18th century Switzerland, not mid-19th century England) to omitting entire details like the tidbit of Paul and Chani having a young son who is murdered by their rivals in a novel that spans years, not months.

It is easy to wonder whether Fennell is held to a different standard than other filmmakers, perhaps because of her tendencies for decadence and excess (and questionable class subtexts) courting acrimony from a specific, popular lens of modern online criticism. Or, perhaps, it is because she’s a woman. Truthfully, though, it might be less about Fennell than the source material. While del Toro and Villeneuve, like Fennell, had intense formative experiences growing up with the novels they adapted, Wuthering Heights is a far more universal foundational text for thousands due to being on the English curriculum of most secondary or high schools on either side of the Atlantic.

Wuthering Heights has been read by more modern audiences than Frankenstein or Dune, or Dracula, or probably even Huckleberry Finn. To let Cathy and Heathcliff have sex on the moors is a bit like revealing to audiences that Ebenezer Scrooge is married. That’s just not the way things are supposed to happen!

But at the end of the day, art is much more fulfilling when engaged on its own terms versus comparing it side by side with a text. The best films based on books generally make mincemeat of their source material—The Godfather, Jaws, The Shining—and as del Toro himself once said, “At the end of the day, I say adapting is like marrying a widow. You can pay respect to the late husband, but on Saturdays, you gotta get it on.”

Being able to get it on is one thing Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has no trouble with, especially when Charli XCX ballads drift across the 19th century moors.

Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.

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