Romance/ Drama – R – 2h 16m
2 out of 5 stars
When we live in an age of rampant attention deficit, instant gratification, and the simplification of complex ideas, we get art that satisfies those demands—art engineered to assure profitability and justify its own expenditure.
One can’t deny that Emerald Fennell has a distinctive style and vision unlike any other director working today. Her films cater to—and succeed within—all the parameters mentioned above. They are visually arresting—subtlety is not part of her cinematic language—and Wuthering Heights, which has just opened in U.S. theaters, feels like the apogee of her creative vision to date.
Image via Instagram / @filmcharlie_
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are red-hot, box-office-ready assault weapons in this highly reductive version of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The cast includes Owen Cooper as young Heathcliff, following his smash success in Adolescence. Alison Oliver, as Cathy’s sister-in-law Isabella, provides some genuinely effective comic moments, while Hong Chau’s inconspicuous villain, Nelly, doesn’t quite register as being as bad as the film insists she is.
You may feel overwhelmed by the stunning cinematography by Linus Sandgren and the marathon of breathtaking costumes by Jacqueline Durran.
© 2026 Warner Brothers International
There is so much beauty—ugly beauty and beautiful ugliness—that the aesthetics overtake the narrative and become the film’s true focal point. The highly stylized production trivializes the story and its characters. For a very good portion of the runtime, the plot is reduced to Cathy (Robbie) and Heathcliff (Elordi) alternating between steamy encounters and bickering. Their love story didn’t touch me here. What I did notice, however, is that no matter how poor or wealthy, laughing or crying, these characters were, they always looked perfect. Robbie and Elordi are so perfect, in fact, that they begin to resemble mannequins posed inside an expensive display window.
Image via Instagram / @wutheringheightsmovie
Image via Instagram / @wutheringheightsmovie
That is because Ms. Fennell is overly concerned with style over substance. No matter how hard Cathy cries, all the suffering—considering the settings—feels abstract and histrionic. A piece of disheveled hair here, a smear of mascara there (because in this version there is that, and even rhinestones on Cathy’s cheeks during the dinner when she is happy her love has returned) would have given the viewer some indication of the characters’ emotional state—made them relatable—but that is not what the movie aims for. This is a visual feast in the most literal sense of the word. Beauty here feels synthetic at times—the kind that floods the endless stream of AI-generated images you scroll past on TikTok and Instagram.
Image via Instagram / @filmcharlie_
And yet, this artificial sheen exists in contrast to several elegantly photographed scenes that possess the luminosity of a Vermeer painting. The recent online controversy about the historical accuracy of the costumes has, of course, worked well for the film’s publicity. Perhaps that, too, was part of the design. It makes sense if one imagines that Fennell wanted to transcend a romance rooted in a specific period and transform it into an ambiguous Disney fairy tale for adults, laden with sex and crowned with a very unhappy ending.
Image via Instagram / @filmcharlie_
