- February 17, 2026
- By Sarah Snyder
The greatest love story of all time? A depressing portrait of possession and revenge? A desecration of a literary masterpiece? Audiences flocking into movie theaters to watch director Emerald Fennell’s much-anticipated adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, are staggering out with a range of opinions.
The internet is abuzz with hot takes from movie critics, literary purists and audiences newly introduced to the story by the “Saltburn” director. On its Valentine’s Day opening weekend, the film reached $83 million in global ticket sales. Even sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel are skyrocketing.
As someone who discovered the works of the Brontë sisters in a 19th-century English novel course, focused my research on the Brontës in graduate school and even got engaged on the moors the Brontë sisters traversed, I’m not surprised by the current interest or criticisms. “Wuthering Heights” has long been a story that inspires strong emotions and captivates with each retelling.
I sat down with William Cohen, a fellow Brontë enthusiast, professor of English and comparative literature, and associate provost and dean for undergraduate studies, to discuss Fennell’s adaptation and what it gets right, wrong and somewhere in between. Cohen, whose scholarship and teaching focus on literature and culture of the Victorian period, has taught the novel regularly in his courses at UMD. Read on for his takeaways.
The movie doesn’t try to follow the book’s narrative structure.
The book’s narrative is conveyed as a story within a story and follows a complex timeline through multiple narrators including Mr. Lockwood, who listens to Nelly Dean, a housekeeper, as she chronicles the history of the Earnshaw and Linton families. The second half of the novel focuses on the second generation of the families. Cohen points out that a family tree outlining the connections and timeline is often invaluable for keeping track of who’s who, so it makes sense for the structure of the film to be much different.
“You could never do what the book does in the medium of film. I think Emerald Fennell is probably right to dispense with the frame and to dispense with the second half and make some big changes. I thought condensing Cathy's brother and father into one malign character worked well for the film.”
But viewers miss one of the novel's most iconic scenes.
Cohen says, “When I teach the novel, I tell students, if you remember nothing else about ‘Wuthering Heights,’ you'll remember Mr. Lockwood grabbing and scraping a ghostly hand against the broken window. And so it is notable that the scene is missing.”
In fact, the scene is so iconic that it’s a central image of Kate Bush’s 1978 hit song “Wuthering Heights” (“It's me/ I'm Cathy/I've come home, I'm so cold/Let me in your window”). That’s all to say, there’s no lack of intentional hand imagery in the film. Numerous candleholders and a somewhat creepy sculpture above the mantel of the fireplace prominently feature plaster hands of a variety of shapes and sizes.
Fennell impressively captures the natural landscape.
Understanding the Brontës is intrinsically linked to knowing where they lived and wrote. All of the surviving siblings (Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne) developed a deep appreciation and love for the rugged Yorkshire moors. Their writings are steeped with references to the natural landscape, a place they roamed from an early age. In “Wuthering Heights,” the moors are central to the narrative.
“I visited Haworth, where the Brontës lived, and the thing that struck me was that you get to the parsonage from the town and immediately out of the back door, you're on the moors. Emily was obviously very oriented to the landscape. I think a filmmaker has a responsibility to capture this,” Cohen says.
“The scenes in the rain, and the one of Heathcliff barreling down on a horse in the sunset—I thought that was visually incredible to get the sense of what it means to be in that landscape.”
The book’s ambiguity on Heathcliff made casting him tricky.
The casting of Elordi, a white Australian actor with previous roles in “Frankenstein” and “Saltburn,” as Heathcliff has come under immense scrutiny from a variety of critics and readers. Fennell has said in interviews that the film is her creative interpretation of the novel and emphasized this by noting the quotation marks around the title. But numerous references in the book suggest Brontë intended the character’s race to be open-ended and he may well not have been white.
Cohen points out, “One of the things a book can do is foster ambiguity on a question like this. The novel is complex and multiform, and you get different angles based on who's speaking. We never get an objective view in this book. In the film, the director has to make a decision about casting and about who's going to embody this character. Understanding the book in the historical context of evolving discussions about race and ethnicity—including about the Irish, South Asians, and people of African descent—allows us to think about the different meanings of Heathcliff as one identity versus another.”
The movie reduces the deep connection between Cathy and Heathcliff to sexual passion.
Cohen notes, “Part of what was shocking about ‘Wuthering Heights’ to its first readers was that it was wild. It was brooding. There’s a lot of violence. There’s a lot of conflict, and there’s a lot of passion. Whether it’s entirely sexual passion is debatable.”
One thing the film misses for him is the idea of Cathy and Heathcliff being one person sharing a soul. He says, “In the book, the strongest bond between Heathcliff and Cathy is one of identification. It's overlaid with desire, but it's not quite desire. Cathy utters lines like, ‘He’s more myself than I am,’ ‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’ and “I am Heathcliff.’ She sees them as already fused and having a single identity, sharing a soul, and that's different from romantic love.”