A Correction That Still Rings True
Three years after Wuthering Heights was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell, Charlotte Brontë issued a correction in the novel’s new edition, defending her sister Emily’s work. “The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised,” she wrote in 1850. “Its import and nature were misunderstood.”
That sentiment holds devastatingly true with the arrival of “Wuthering Heights” (yes, Emerald Fennell puts the title in quotation marks), the writer-director’s fast and loose adaptation of the beloved novel. I now understand why she opted for those quotation marks—because this is by no means a faithful adaptation or even an interesting reinterpretation. It’s shallow fan fiction that has more in common with E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey than Brontë’s unflinching portrait of obsessive love, vengeance, the violence of class systems, racism, and generational trauma.
If, as Fennell has stated in interviews, this film represents her teenage recollection of Wuthering Heights, then it speaks more to the white affluence and limited perspective of her upbringing than it does to Brontë’s revolutionary novel.
The Egregious Whitewashing of Heathcliff
Let’s address the elephant in the moors: the casting of white actors Owen Cooper and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff is not just a questionable creative choice—it’s egregious erasure in 2025. This isn’t a matter of interpretation or artistic license. Emily Brontë explicitly describes Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gipsy” with features that mark him as ethnically distinct from the white Yorkshire families around him. The text repeatedly emphasizes his darkness, his foreignness, and the racial prejudice he faces.
Literary scholars have long interpreted Heathcliff as a person of color—potentially Black, South Asian, or of mixed heritage—reflecting his status as a permanent outcast in white society. The novel even describes him as a “little Lascar,” a term specifically used for sailors from the Indian subcontinent. His racial otherness isn’t incidental to the story; it’s fundamental to understanding the violence enacted upon him, his alienation, and the systemic barriers that fuel his vengeful trajectory.
When Mr. Earnshaw brings young Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights, he’s described as speaking “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” He’s called racial slurs throughout the novel. Hindley’s abuse of him is explicitly racialized. His inability to ever truly belong, no matter how wealthy he becomes, reflects the rigid racial hierarchies of 19th-century England. To cast Heathcliff as white is to fundamentally misunderstand—or worse, deliberately ignore—one of the novel’s core themes.
Ironically, Fennell cast mixed British-Pakistani actor Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, who could have been perfect as Heathcliff. Instead, Latif’s casting becomes tokenistic diversity that ticks a box while actively avoiding the story’s actual racial commentary. His Edgar barely registers as a character, serving merely as window dressing in scenes modeled after Catherine’s skin (yes, really). Where Brontë’s Edgar is laced with snobbish hostility toward Heathcliff—becoming a catalyst for the low-born man’s revenge—Latif’s iteration rarely engages with his supposed rival.
In an era when we’re finally reckoning with representation in period dramas, when shows like Bridgerton have opened doors for diverse casting, choosing to whitewash a character explicitly coded as non-white is indefensible. This isn’t about “staying true to previous adaptations” (which also got it wrong). This is about recognizing what Brontë actually wrote and honoring the revolutionary aspects of her work.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi: All Wrong for Catherine and Heathcliff
Beyond the racial erasure, Robbie’s casting as Catherine Earnshaw is equally ill-fitted, though for different reasons. Don’t misunderstand—Robbie is a phenomenal actress, and she looks amazing at 35. But here, her age works against the authenticity of Catherine’s youthful recklessness and naivety. Brontë’s Catherine is a dark-haired, dark-eyed teenager whose unruly stubbornness and violent passion she shares with a similarly-aged Heathcliff, their juvenile nature speaking volumes about their doomed love.
Robbie struggles to exude the naivety of a teen who genuinely believes she can have her cake and eat it too—marrying wealthy Edgar Linton for social status while maintaining her spiritual bond with Heathcliff. There’s a desperation to her performance that reads as a grown woman making terrible decisions rather than a girl who doesn’t yet understand the consequences of her choices. Catherine’s famous declaration “I am Heathcliff” should feel like the absolute conviction of first love; instead, it lands with the weight of someone who should know better.
As for Elordi’s Heathcliff, while his Yorkshire accent isn’t terrible, his performance recalls his Euphoria character Nate Jacobs more than Brontë’s antagonistic antihero. Fennell strips away the compelling social commentary about Heathcliff’s ethnic ambiguity and sanitizes the brutality of his revenge narrative, softening his aggressive cruelty into something coldly charismatic in that modern prestige TV way. We’re meant to find him attractive and brooding rather than genuinely frightening in his capacity for violence.
A Script That Betrays Brontë’s Gothic Soul
Fennell dispenses with the novel’s framing device—the stories told by multiple narrators—as well as numerous characters who fully contextualize the toxic atmosphere of the eponymous estate. Instead, she opens with a contrived public hanging scene, gleefully watched by young Catherine (Charlotte Mellington), as the camera follows common folk engaging in promiscuity and children laugh at the hanged man’s “stiffy.” This sets the highly sexualized tone for the rest of the film, which seems more interested in steamy scenes than substance.
Robbie and Elordi are obviously very attractive people, and with the sheer number of sex scenes shoehorned in, you’d be forgiven for thinking this amounts to palpable chemistry. But it all feels forced, like a bargain bin romance novel come to life, working overtime to hide the erasure of Brontë’s far more complex ideas about the hell of societal convention, the prison of class systems, and the ways love can become weaponized.
That’s due in large part to the script, which ignores the Gothic supernatural elements that make the novel so haunting—Catherine’s ghost, the blurring of reality and obsession—and too often paraphrases Brontë’s earnest, expressive dialogue in key scenes. Fans hoping to hear Catherine’s iconic “If all else perished, and he remained” speech will be left bitterly disappointed. It’s reduced to a pale shadow of its literary power, stripped of the language that makes it resonate across centuries.
The Supporting Cast Deserved Better
Supporting players Hong Chau (as Nelly Dean) and Alison Oliver (as Isabella Linton) fare considerably better, though they’re working with limited material. While Nelly’s backstory is changed from servant to bastard companion of the Earnshaw family, Chau affords her character a quiet composure as a vulnerable witness to—and sometimes meddler in—Catherine and Heathcliff’s destructive romance. She brings gravitas to scenes that desperately need it.
As Edgar’s ward (she’s his sister in the book), Oliver nails Isabella’s sickly sweet innocence, bringing a deviant edge to her infatuation with Heathcliff that hints at the darkness she’s drawn to. Even as the film weirdly pushes Isabella to evoke the spirit of Brontë’s Catherine, she makes interesting choices. Honestly, it’s a wonder Fennell didn’t just cast the Irish actor as her lead—Oliver has more of the wild, reckless energy Catherine requires.
Style Over Substance
Fennell’s approach to the class divide feels hackneyed as well. The lilt of the Yorkshire accent is relegated to the lower class, where the film throws in sexual deviancy as a marker of their poverty and lack of refinement. Film and TV frequently stereotype the Yorkshire accent this way, but the Earnshaws aren’t landed gentry; they didn’t require posh accents like the Lintons to reinforce the upstairs-downstairs dynamic. It’s a superficial understanding of how class actually functioned in this setting.
Cinematographer Linus Sandgren does capture the tumultuous beauty of the Yorkshire Moors and the stormy atmosphere of the Heights estate, which is genuinely gorgeous. But the production design of Thrushcross Grange is jarringly anachronistic—it becomes a Gothic Barbie Dreamhouse (derogatory), with costuming that’s more Alice in Wonderland than period-appropriate. Throw in Charli XCX’s pulsating original songs and Anthony Willis’s overwhelming score, and you’ve got a bombastic world that does more to distract than solidify the emotional journey of these iconic literary figures.
The film feels like Fennell watched Marie Antoinette and The Great and decided that aesthetic anachronism equals artistic innovation, without understanding that those films used their modern elements to comment on their subjects. Here, the style choices feel arbitrary, like a mood board that never cohered into a unified vision.
Missing the Point Entirely
I don’t believe all book-to-screen adaptations need to be carbon copies of their source material—some of the best adaptations take creative liberties that illuminate new aspects of familiar stories. But Fennell’s vision doesn’t illuminate anything new; it actively obscures the revolutionary aspects of Brontë’s work.
The novel’s supernatural elements? Gone. The complex frame narrative that questions the reliability of what we’re seeing? Eliminated. The racial commentary that made Heathcliff’s story so radical for 1847? Whitewashed. The Gothic horror that made readers uncomfortable? Replaced with pretty cinematography and sex scenes. What remains is a hollow shell that uses Brontë’s name recognition while betraying nearly everything that made her novel groundbreaking.
Maybe if you haven’t read the novel, “Wuthering Heights” will work for you as a period romance with attractive leads. But for those of us who understand what Brontë actually wrote—a story about how racism, classism, and obsessive love can destroy multiple generations—this adaptation is a profound disappointment that does real harm by erasing the novel’s most challenging elements.
The Verdict
“Wuthering Heights” is a superficial facsimile of Emily Brontë’s daring, radical novel—one that feels particularly egregious in 2025, when we should know better than to whitewash characters explicitly described as people of color. The decision to cast white actors as Heathcliff erases crucial racial commentary and represents a failure of both imagination and responsibility. Fennell’s world-building hovers between keen-eyed cinematography and grossly ostentatious production design, with the Gothic soul of the story exorcised in favor of an overly romanticized script that streamlines the plot, characters, and thematic weight into something barely recognizable.
While Hong Chau and Alison Oliver offer assured supporting work that hints at what this film could have been, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are wildly miscast as tragic lovers Catherine and Heathcliff—too old, too glamorous, too modern in their sensibilities to capture these characters’ desperate, destructive passion. What should be a haunting meditation on love, revenge, and social barriers becomes little more than an expensive costume drama more interested in aesthetics than ideas.
Brontë deserved better. Heathcliff deserved better. And audiences deserve adaptations that grapple with the challenging, uncomfortable aspects of classic literature rather than sanding them down into something palatable and pretty.
Rating: 4/10
Have you seen Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”? Do you think period adaptations have a responsibility to cast characters as they’re described in the source material, especially when racial identity is central to the story? And what’s your favorite adaptation of this classic novel? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
