Two Women, One Moor, and the Heathcliff One of Them Erased

Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights came out in theaters on February 13th, 2026. However, this adaptation has been in the media’s bad graces long before that. There was a general sense that this film could have the power to be electrifying, one that might finally reckon with everything Emily Brontë intended when she put Heathcliff on the page. The new film is not that version. And honestly, that stings a little. 

Heathcliff's racial ambiguity isn't a small fragment of anyone’s imagination. It's baked into the text. Brontë goes out of her way to describe him as a dark-skinned "foundling" dragged in from the streets of Liverpool, a historic port city in the 1770s that was deeply embedded in the transatlantic slave trade. He's called a "gypsy," a "little Lascar," and repeatedly compared to a "dark-skinned gypsy in aspect" by nearly every character who encounters him. The Earnshaws and Lintons don't just dislike Heathcliff because he's poor or rough around the edges. They are repulsed by him in a way that has a very specific, very ugly shape to it. And Brontë knew exactly what she was doing. 

That context is what makes Heathcliff's obsession with vengeance so devastating. While Jacob Elordi’s depiction of the character was customary, it lacked one of the key segments that not only made the character, but the story, so complex and heartfelt. Strip that away, and you're left with what the new film seems happy to give us: a moody white British man sulking across the moors because a girl chose money over him. Which, okay, relatable. But it fundamentally misreads the book. 

Fennell does respond to the backlash, just not in the way most fans were hoping. “I think the thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” she says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t know, I think I was focusing on the pseudo-masochistic elements of it.” She continues, “Like many people who love this book, I’m kind of fanatical about it, so I knew right from the get-go I couldn’t ever hope to make anything that could even encompass the greatness of this book. All I could do was make a movie that made me feel the way the book made me feel, and therefore it just felt right to say it’s Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.” While Fennell aims to pay homage to the author, she’s the first to admit that her movie is purely interpretive. Fair enough. However, not everyone has $80 million to bankroll their personal take on a beloved book. So the real question is: should adaptations serve the artists’ vision, or the millions of fans who’ve been living inside that story long before the cameras started rolling? 

It isn’t as if adaptations of Brontë’s novel have always been misrepresented. In 2011, Andrea Arnold directed Wuthering Heights, and while not all specifics were accurate (as is often the case with modern adaptations of classic novels), Heathcliff’s character was portrayed as he should be, which automatically gave the story an edge. He beats the system that tried to erase him using the system's own tools. That's Shakespearean. That's genuinely complex. A conventionally handsome white protagonist doing the same thing just reads more like a jerk going through it. 

Instead, the film smooths out all these edges into something more palatable, romantic. The moors are gorgeous. The chemistry between leads is fine. The costumes are doing their absolute best. But there's a kind of creative cowardice in choosing the path of least resistance with source material that was never meant to be comfortable. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was weird, violent, and morally unresolved when it was first published. It was rejected by critics as "too dark" and "too savage." Honestly, that was the compliment. 

There's something almost ironic about Hollywood’s obsession with returning to classic novels, insisting they need to be retold, and then systematically removing the very things that make them worth retelling. The 2011 Andrea Arnold adaptation at least dared to cast a Black actor as Heathcliff and lean into the racial dynamics at the heart of the story. 

The new film doesn't want to be messy. It wants swelling strings and windswept hair and a steamy, palatable love story for everyone to enjoy without thinking too harshly. But Wuthering Heights was never really a love story. It was always something thornier and more honest than that. Brontë knew that. Emerald Fennel, apparently, does not.