August 28, 2026
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Emerald Fennell says that, in her films, every single detail matters. That every detail should create an emotional response. Her slightly exotic, absurd, and otherworldly adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights certainly achieves this goal. Throughout the film, brilliant colors, lush fabrics, overstated décor, and hypnotic music set the tone. From the astonishing opening scene, details matter in Fennell’s film.
As the film opens, hair miraculously winds into the title frame. The viewer is astonished to learn the background sounds belong to a public hanging. While the hair represents the intertwined nature of Cathy and Healthcliff, the figure suffering on the scaffold reminds the viewer of the raw and brutal nature of the story’s reality. The tortured, blinded figure of the soul is never far from the viewer’s mind. By opening with a hanging, at which Cathy and Nelly are present, the film posits a sort of Hobbesian world in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” One in which the soul remains suspended on a gallows.
What Fennell gets right in this film feels revelatory and cathartic. Clearly, Fennell understands the book on a granular level (though she only focuses solely on the present tense love affair of Cathy and Heathcliff). For example, the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff is perfect. Fennell’s vision and the actors’ dramatizations present a tense, wrought, manipulative, obsessive love. Their relationship is masterfully executed. I admire the forethought which went into telling Cathy and Heathcliff’s story in real time, rather than through the lens of Nelly.
Next, Nelly’s character exists in such a harsh and complicated light. At times, I feel like she is the main character. Much as the novel is told through her, this adaptation revolves around the way that she hovers in the background. She burns letters, craves Cathy’s attention, and keeps secrets. In the novel, too, Nelly is a delicious, enticing, confusing character. Yet, Fennell adds details which carve out a wonderfully well-rounded, interesting, and fulfilling version of Cathy’s nurse and confidant.
Viewers witness the devastatingly harsh life on the moors, witness the sinking of Wuthering Heights and feel the real isolation of each character. Through loose interpretation, Fennell opens astonishing and insightful possibilities into characters like Nelly and Joseph. Imagine a servant’s loneliness, for example. Imagine how dependent they would be upon their placement. Nelly clearly wants to stay with Cathy. She is, in fact, desperate to stay with Cathy, which we notice at Wuthering Heights and even more dramatically at Thrushcross Grange.
Fennell also complicates Joseph. In the novel, he remains hateful, arrogant, abusive, and unempathetic. The sparse backstory never explains his twisted sermons and vindictive nature. In the end, the reader can offer him no sympathy. The film, however, provides background details. In one scene, Catherine returns to Wuthering Heights at Christmas to see her father, an abusive gambler and a drunk. Before she enters the house, she sees Joseph and asks about his recent relationship. Joseph, though, knows that he is too poor and lowly, too rough and pitiful to be married. He explains to her that the other woman is married now: “Yeah, she’s got a little boy now. Tubby little rascal. See them in the village sometimes. She doesn’t greet me. But it wouldn’t look well, her talking to someone like me. I’d embarrass her.” Culture demands that he remain lowly and dirty. This is the degraded sort of life that Heathcliff vehemently fights against and foreshadows the brutal nature of his future.
Fennell avoids the novel’s lengthy history. Rather than recounting the tale after Cathy’s death through Nelly’s memories, we see Cathy caged at Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange could not be more dissimilar, yet both provide unhealthy environments. Debt, death, and darkness surround Wuthering Heights whereas Thrushcross Grange is vibrant, extravagant, exotic, and overwrought. So, while we lose the novel’s lengthy history of obsession and family disease, I feel that Fennell has, once again, made a savvy choice in focusing on the love affair.
Thrushcross Grange deserves its own blog. It feels like a set within a set. Edward Linton transforms this property into a facsimile of life, like a circus or carousel. Isabella Linton fills closets with play clothes and even builds a dollhouse replica of Thrushcross. The dollhouse accentuates the strangeness of Cathy’s life with the Lintons. While Isabella fills the dollhouse with minutia, Edward Linton adds eccentricities to the actual house. For example, Cathy’s room is the color of her skin, even including freckles. And, lucky for Cathy, just across the hall, Edward Linton’s emerald green room reflects wealth and hope. Though it also comes with a level of emasculation.
Vibrant reds represent passion, pain, blood. Blood returns again and again in this film. The blood that falls from Heathcliff’s bleeding back after a cruel whipping never stops spilling. A few scenes include: Cathy walking through pig’s blood which stains her hem; Isabella stabbing a sewing needle into her hand reflective of her own brand of madness and boredom; and Cathy’s blood pouring out of her pale skinned room like a river.
The true backdrop of the film is fog and rain and dampness. The scenes among the moors are the best. Of course, they are the most natural, enabling freedom for the characters of Cathy and Heathcliff. No other characters venture among the moors (except for Nelly, but only once).
If Fennell’s goal was to create an emotional response for the viewer, I think she has done just that. Every scene aroused strong feelings in me. Sometimes, the lovers dismayed me. Sometimes, color and costume suffocated me. Sometimes, the excess appalled. And often, I was horrified by brutality.
While I felt that some of the scenes – like that of the snail or the fish – were intrusive, overall, the emotional register was just right. This is definitely a retelling since major details differ from the novel, yet Fennell’s film achieves emotional highs and lows which correspond to how I feel when I read Brontë’s original work.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Aerial Media Hub, (Top Withins, a farmhouse that has been associated with Wuthering Heights)
