Illustration by Abubacar Keita
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” has caused quite a stir on the internet, even before its Feb. 13 theater release. Controversial castings, inaccurate costumes and a trailer deeming “Wuthering Heights” as “The Greatest Love Story of All Time” furrowed brows cynically.
The movie has elicited mixed reactions, currently holding a 58% tomatometer (critic rating) and 76% popcornmeter (user rating) on Rotten Tomatoes.
Directors hold a certain level of responsibility when choosing to adapt books into movies, and it is not an easy task to please devoted fans of said source material. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is so drastically removed from Brontë’s novel that one wonders what the point of adapting it was.
Romance adaptations have been on the rise, especially those popular on BookTok. Think of Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends with Us or Regretting You”. Emily Henry’s “People We Meet on Vacation” was released on Netflix this past January. It seems Fennell could not resist the urge to transform Brontë’s complex novel into a fast, TikTok-esque romance.
One of the main criticisms of Fennell’s movie has been the watering down of Brontë’s themes in favor of a forbidden love story. Many reviewers have also said that you can only enjoy the movie if you completely separate it from the source material.
Then, what’s the point of even adapting it? Why couldn’t Fennell write an original screenplay with original characters suffering in the moors?
National Public Radio’s (NPR) critique put it succinctly: “Wuthering Heights celebrates mad passionate excess, — but lacks real feeling.” People are not impressed when directors use a popular title to bring more cash, instead of taking risks with writing a fresh script.
On IMDB, the one critique above all else is the movie’s style over substance. One user commented, “This movie does look incredible, the colour palette is a visual feast…The performances are irritating, soulless and well, dopey, and truly unbelievable.”
Another agreed, “stunning and appealing, but unfortunately, it’s gothic and emotional connection with its characters and structure feels lifeless, disjointed, and lacking.”
Time and time again, “Wuthering Heights” movie adaptations have refused to accurately cast Heathcliff. From Ralph Fiennes to Jacob Elordi, directors have purposefully chosen to overlook this crucial aspect of the book. It is 2026 and a Black or brown actor has not been casted to play as Heathcliff.
People are exhausted from the erasure of ethnic characters in favor of conventionally attractive white actors. Fennell choosing to cast Jacob Elordi essentially sends the message that “Wuthering Heights” cannot be fun, sexy or entertaining without a hot white man lifting an aged Margot Robbie by the corset (she is supposed to be 18 years old, by the way).
In a time when the political administration isn’t interested in ethnic representation, a whitewashed “Wuthering Heights” is definitely what we needed.
I left Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” feeling nothing. It was a visually pretty movie with unconventional costumes and two attractive leads, but it did not address race, class and gender roles the way the novel masterfully does.
Fennell stripped away what made the book so compelling and instead created pallid fanfiction. The fact that many others feel the same goes to show that we want stories to meaningfully engage with us.
Despite my negative feelings toward Fennell’s adaptation, the movie left me with hope. This decade has brought notable movie adaptations of classic novels — Emma, the Dune series, and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”, to name a few.
“Wuthering Heights” reminds audiences what made those previous adaptations successful. The directors kept the essence of the novel while adding a few authentic touches. Fennell’s failure to do this sets a higher standard for adaptations of classics that online discourse has made loud and clear: Get the themes right.
