Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights survived 179 years, multiple adaptations, and the entire twentieth century with its reputation intact. Heathcliff and Cathy remain two of literature's most electrically rendered figures — wild, selfish, cosmically intertwined, and ultimately destroyed by the gap between what they want and what the world permits. So there's a real question worth asking about Emerald Fennell's adaptation: is she bringing out what's already in the text, or importing her own fixations into it? After 136 minutes, the answer is mostly the second one.

Plot Summary

Set in 1771, Wuthering Heights follows Catherine "Cathy" Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), a foundling boy rescued from the Liverpool streets by Cathy's father and brought to their windswept Yorkshire estate. The children form an inseparable bond that outlasts Earnshaw's death, the estate's decline, Cathy's socially strategic marriage to wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and Heathcliff's eventual mysterious return with a fortune and a consuming desire for revenge. The story ends in death, grief, and the hollow victory of a man who wanted everything and ended up with nothing.

The bones of Brontë's novel are present and mostly intact. The emotional architecture works. The tragedy lands. The problem is what Fennell builds on top of the bones.

Fennell opens with a public hanging in 1771. The condemned man has a visible erection. The crowd — including young Cathy and her companion Nelly Dean — watches with what the film frames as something between horror and arousal. It's designed to announce, loudly, what kind of film this is going to be. It's also not in the novel.

That pattern holds throughout. A BDSM encounter between servants Joseph and Zillah in the barn (not in Brontë). An extended masturbation sequence on the moors (not in Brontë). The explicit degradation of Isabella at Heathcliff's hands, rendered in graphic detail with careful attention to Isabella's apparent enjoyment (not in Brontë — Heathcliff's cruelty to Isabella in the novel is implied and reported secondhand). Fennell shoots it as something adjacent to erotic performance art.

None of this makes the film without power. Margot Robbie is ferociously good as Cathy. She finds the character's essential contradiction — genuinely loving Heathcliff, genuinely choosing social advancement over him, genuinely not fully understanding that those two things cannot coexist — and plays all three registers at once. Jacob Elordi's Heathcliff is slower to ignite but lands hard once he does. The reunion scene is electric. The final death scene is heartbreaking in the way the novel intended. When Fennell is adapting Brontë faithfully, the film earns its existence.

The problem is Fennell doesn't trust the source material to be provocative enough on its own.

Trope Analysis — VVWS Weighted Scoring

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity (1-5)	Authenticity	Centrality	Weighted Score
Female sexuality as liberation / self-discovery (Cathy's moors masturbation scene, framed as awakening)	3	Injected (1.5)	Supporting (1.0)	9.0
Transgressive sexuality normalized (BDSM barn scene; Isabella/Heathcliff degradation arc as consensual performance)	3	Injected (1.5)	Supporting (1.0)	9.0
Provocation as artistic statement (opening hanging scene — shock positioning, no narrative purpose)	3	Injected (1.5)	Supporting (1.0)	4.5
Diversity casting in period-incongruent roles (Hong Chau, Shazad Latif in 1770s Yorkshire with no in-world explanation)	2	Injected (1.5)	Supporting (1.0)	6.0
Anti-traditional institution framing (marriage as cage; Edgar as sterile establishment vs. authentic desire)	2	Natural (0.75)	Supporting (1.0)	3.0
The Marginalized Savant (Heathcliff as dark outsider whose passion exceeds the establishment)	3	Organic (0.5)	Central (1.5)	4.5
WOKE TOTAL	36.0

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity (1-5)	Authenticity	Centrality	Weighted Score
All-consuming romantic love as life's defining force (Heathcliff/Cathy bond — faithfully rendered)	5	Organic (0.5)	Defining (2.0)	15.0
Moral consequences — tragedy follows moral failure (Cathy's death, Heathcliff's hollow victory)	4	Organic (0.5)	Central (1.5)	9.0
Class distinctions depicted as real and consequential (not villainized but as structural reality Cathy must navigate)	2	Organic (0.5)	Supporting (1.0)	2.0
TRAD TOTAL	26.0

Director / Writer Ideological Track Record

Emerald Fennell has made three feature films. All three center transgressive sexuality as a primary aesthetic tool. Promising Young Woman (2020) is an explicitly feminist rape-revenge thriller that won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Saltburn (2023) uses class horror as a vehicle for increasingly explicit transgressive content (the bathtub scene, the grave scene became cultural flashpoints). Now Wuthering Heights applies the same toolkit to a canonical 19th-century text.

Fennell is a genuine filmmaker — technically accomplished, emotionally intelligent, capable of sustained craft. She is also a filmmaker with a consistent ideological project: provocation through sexuality, with feminist re-reading of female desire as the underlying thesis. Audiences who don't know her prior work will be blindsided by Wuthering Heights. Audiences who do know it will recognize the blueprint immediately.

LuckyChap Entertainment, Margot Robbie's production company, has now produced Promising Young Woman, Barbie, and Wuthering Heights — a clean triple of feminist-adjacent prestige provocations. This is not coincidence. LuckyChap has a thesis. Knowing that thesis helps audiences understand what product they're being sold.

Adult Viewer Insight

Wuthering Heights is genuinely worth seeing if you know what you're walking into. Robbie gives one of the performances of her career. Elordi grows into Heathcliff in ways that earn the film's final act. Linus Sandgren's cinematography is stunning — the moors are shot with a cold, bruised beauty that matches the novel's emotional landscape perfectly. The tragedy, when Fennell stops intervening in it, is powerful.

The practical question for conservative adults: is the film anti-conservative in a political sense? Not directly. There are no lectures, no contemporary social messaging, no diversity speeches. The politics are embedded in the aesthetic choices — what Fennell adds to Brontë's story, and what those additions communicate about female sexuality and desire. A viewer who doesn't engage with those layers can watch the surface film (doomed love, beautiful photography, tragic ending) and find it worthwhile. A viewer paying closer attention will see the machine running underneath it.

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