The opening scene of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the classic gothic novel Wuthering Heights features a slow rhythmic squeaking, reminiscent of the synchronised sexual and household sounds of Jeunet and Caro’s 1991 film Delicatessen. But the sounds here are of a man swinging from a hang-man’s noose. The scene portends the direction that Emerald Fennell is about to take, and the inverted quotes on the film’s title “Wuthering Heights” hint that this will not be a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontës 1847 novel. And nor is that to be expected from Emerald Fennell.  The novel was Brontë’s first and only published novel, she succumbed to TB the following year. One can only imagine that Brontë herself would be awed to see her novel continue to resonate and to spark adaptation upon adaptation, from the Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon of 1939 through to 2026.

Released in Ireland on 13^th Feb 2026, and starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, Fennell’s adaptation doesn’t hold fast and true to the original novel, but it does superbly capture the passion between Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s a love story that tells the age-old story of the struggle of love across class, and the challenge for any human to keep a close hold on love amidst grinding poverty. Sexuality simmers throughout, and indeed the Irish censors of the 1950’s would have needed little imagination to give the film top marks for content ruinous to the Irish morals of that John Charles McQuade era of repression.

Cathy is the young daughter of Earnshaw, owner of farmhouse Wuthering Heights. On one drunken outing to town Earnshaw acquires Heathcliff, a young boy without family or means. Heathcliff is brought home to Wuthering Heights and Cathy and himself grow up, and grow close, together. Robbie plays Cathy as adventurous and passionate, not without compassion but wilful also with a touch of the cruel. Elordi’s Heathcliff is all brooding and handsome, but on the left foot as he remains the waif that was taken in and not an Earnshaw. A servant called Nellie is the illegitimate child of a relative, and remains outside the duo. As Earnshaw descends further into gambling and addiction the family becomes poorer and poorer, and in the end are unable to afford wood for heating.

Enter new and wealthy neighbours, Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella, expertly played by Alison Oliver, of Conversations with Friends. Edgar is eminently marriageable and Cathy ultimately chooses this life. Heathcliff overhears part of a conversation between Cathy and Nellie where Cathy says that marrying Heathcliff would demean her. This signals a change in direction as Heathcliff storms off, shot through the heart. Cathy leaves Wuthering Heights and her father, and marries Linton. The hyperreal colours of ? the rich red of the ? and are reminiscent of the TV comic-fantasy series The Good Place, while in contrast the dirt, cold, darkness, and ceaseless wuthering across the moors at Wuthering Heights effect the perception that this is a ‘bad place’.

Heathcliff later returns to Wuthering Heights as a self-actualised man, confident, affluent and well-groomed handsome man. At least on the surface. It transpires that the effects of Cathy’s hurtful rejection cannot be smoothed past. It is not a thing apart. There are some things that love cannot vanquish and the returned Heathcliff succumbs to a toxic version of his younger hopeful self. He demeans Isabella, though Fennell has him repeatedly ask for her consent.  We see Isabella, choose to break free of her ribbon fetish and her dolls house fantasy world and embark on this perilous relationship with Heathcliff. While chained and on all fours in the inhospitably cold, dark and hard Wuther Heights Isabella laps up the S&M degradation, and then winks directly to camera. This breaking of the fourth wall (the only time in the film), suggests to the audience that this is all make-believe, and thus no need to invoke #MeToo. I’m not sure Fennell totally gets away with this given the degradation of women, from politicians to popstars to children, in an age of AI enabled deep fake apps is rather serious. Unfortunately.

In contrast to the English Romance poet Coleridge’s world view where “A man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man” this work tells the story of how thwarted love is not at all a ‘thing apart’ either for men or for women. Though both novel and film are artifacts created by women.

The ontological threat that love presents is fully realised….

In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argued Emily was a lesbian, and she herself is Heathcliff—yearning for love she cannot have. Perhaps this resonates with Fennell as her Cathy states that ‘she is Heathcliff’, they are not separate but two sides of the one coin.

The film is tragic and the moral of the story, if there is one, is that denying the heart and opting for a marriage of ‘settling’ requires pushing love down, down, down and ultimately leads only to the rise of its opposite.

And of course that being hungry, cold and poor allows for little in the way of love at all. Though it must be acknowledged that it leans somewhat more to Mills & Boon than Ken Loach in that respect. Fennell is setting out to entertain us, not send us home disquietedly mulling over the injustices of life.

The costuming is stunning, looksmaxxing if you will. In fact, the sight of Cathy sweeping across the moors, and the width of the screen, in her wedding dress stirred a surprising desire in me to get married in such a wondrous gossamer meringue extravaganza.

And a word on the weather. The wuthering across the moors …As in the novel, the weather is a quasi-character itself and is used to full effect and almost emotes the bleakness of it all.

I think the greatest criticism of this film (and there has been much) is that it’s kind of simple. The original dark gothic love story was written in 1847 by a woman of limited means and agency, living in her father’s parsonage in the Yorkshire moors, whose siblings died of TB. Wuthering Heights was Brontë’s first and only published novel, and she also succumbing to TB the year following publication. The film, on the other hand, reflects Fennell’s experience of the novel. The novel has huge influence, being something of a ‘national treasure’ in the English cannon, and it is worth mentioning that most first engage with it during their adolescent school days, that most formative time in young girl’s romantic imagination.

Personally, for someone way past that stage, I experienced Fennell’s film as wildly enjoyable. Margot Robbie plays a blinder, the frocks are fantastic, and it is mercifully devoid of Jedi’s and zombie types.

Rather, isn’t it wonderful that a creative like Fennell can take an English novel from 1847 and re-imagine it for today’s audience, while both fanning film reviewer flames and taking $83m at the global opening weekend box office. I don’t remember any Irish language love story on the second level curriculum to match it. (Fennell would have a challenge on her hands adapting Peig…)