Emerald Fennell’s latest feature adapts Emily Brontë’s novel with a sensuality that rivals Fifty Shades of Grey, yet it possesses more psychological and emotional depth than that entire trilogy.
At just over two hours, the film is expansive — yet paradoxically feels curtailed, as though its narrative breadth has been compressed rather than fully explored.
I haven’t read the source material and can’t judge fidelity. What’s clear onscreen, however, is a screenplay that begins with assurance and gradually dissipates by the third act.
Fennell’s decision to begin at childhood and dwell extensively on Heathcliff and Cathy’s formative bond is both bold and dramatically effective. Where most literary adaptations rely on flashback or exposition, Wuthering Heights invests in lived experience. Their intimacy is not asserted but accumulated, allowing the adult tragedy to emerge from emotional history rather than narrative shorthand.
The film’s structural strain appears late. As it approaches its conclusion, scenes give way to montage and narrative compression, suggesting material sacrificed for duration.
Fennell’s dual role as writer and director affords clear authorship. The film’s visual and tonal identity aligns with her script — until that cohesion loosens in the final act.
For two-thirds of its duration, pacing is measured and assured. Thereafter it buckles: the screenplay accelerates while the direction grows tonally unstable. The story’s emotional register should darken into vindictiveness and despair, yet the film retains an oddly persistent sensuality, blunting the tragic descent it seeks.
Rather than a gradual modulation, tonal transformation arrives abruptly across only a few scenes, altering the film’s emotional architecture too suddenly.
A late flashback attempts structural repair. It enriches the ending’s affect but cannot restore the narrative weight earlier compression has displaced.
If the storytelling falters, the film’s technical execution does not. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is consistently controlled and evocative. Landscapes possess sculptural depth, while interiors counterpoint them with enclosed shadow. One image, in which sunlit figures occupy a yard bounded by a wall beyond which darkness gathers, visualizes the characters’ emotional enclosure with quiet precision.
Production design and color grading similarly sustain the film’s heightened world. The palette leans toward the opulent and theatrical without losing cohesion. Only once does brightness verge on excess — a minor lapse within otherwise exacting visual control.
Performance remains the film’s strongest throughline. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi sustain emotional credibility even as the narrative destabilizes. Elordi, in particular, negotiates Heathcliff’s tonal shifts with striking range.
The final act, despite its structural weaknesses, reveals new severity in both performances, deepening their cumulative effect.
Charlotte Mellington, as the young Cathy, is the film’s quiet anchor. Because the childhood section occupies unusual narrative weight, she must secure the audience’s allegiance before Robbie’s entrance — and does so with remarkable assurance.
Despite third-act compression in script and pacing, Wuthering Heights ultimately holds through performance and visual authorship, achieving a work whose technical and emotional ambitions exceed its structural limitations.