“Wuthering Heights” – Emerald Fennell Unleashes Wild, Erotic, Ravishing Love Without Restraint – Review

The windswept, hallowed moors await audiences in the evocative, ecstatic, ethereal, extreme, and erotically charged cinema experience of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. Delivering 2026’s boldest and most confronting vision of love and romance from every conceivable angle, this is a film that will leave you undone — shaken, breathless, and emotionally scorched.

A passionate and tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, exploring the intense and destructive relationship between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie).

A Fever Dream on the Moors

Across the past decade, Fennell has proven herself a filmmaker unwilling to be restrained by convention, genre, or narrative safety. From the razor-edged provocation of Promising Young Woman to the decadent, venomous seduction of Saltburn, she has continually pushed audiences toward discomfort, intimacy, and revelation. With “Wuthering Heights”, she takes her greatest narrative risk yet, unleashing a deeply personal, wildly sensual interpretation of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic — a film of immense feeling and feral romantic intensity that completely redefines Valentine’s Day cinema.

Emerald Fennell’s Burning Projection

Early speculation suggested “Wuthering Heights” might employ a modern framing device; a contemporary character stepping into Brontë’s tale. In a sense, this is true. That character is Emerald Fennell herself.

This adaptation plays like a projected fever dream: the emotional, sensual, and psychological reality of Fennell reading Wuthering Heights, her thoughts and desires elevated into a heightened cinematic state. What unfolds feels less like a traditional adaptation and more like an intimate psychic experience — images intensified, emotions amplified, passions unrestrained. As an audience, we are plunged directly into Fennell’s subconscious, and the result is utterly bewitching.

This is a film that ignites every sense. You leave trembling with adrenaline, skin prickling, heart racing. It’s an experience that makes you shudder, gasp, and ache; a visceral reminder of cinema’s ability to overwhelm.

Maximalist Gothic Romance

There is nothing restrained about “Wuthering Heights”. Every creative choice is pushed to its most expressive extreme, transforming Brontë’s tragic romance into a grand gothic fantasia told at maximalist volume.

Fennell’s collaborators elevate this vision into something operatic. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren, production designer Suzie Davies, costume designer Jacqueline Durran, composer Anthony Willis, and pop provocateur Charli XCX combine forces to create a world that feels colossal yet deeply intimate, a living, breathing manifestation of desire.

The film’s visual palette evolves with its characters: from dark, brooding earth tones that reflect Cathy and Heathcliff’s feral youth at Wuthering Heights, to the baroque, fairy-tale decadence of Thrushcross Grange, where longing mutates into obsession. Sandgren’s imagery is crisp, vivid, and unapologetically cinematic – every frame drenched in atmosphere, never bland, always alive.

Intimacy as Character

Jacqueline Durran’s costume work is nothing short of rapturous. With over 60 costume changes, Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw is adorned in a wardrobe that charts her journey from impoverished yearning to bourgeois decadence, and ultimately to the visual expression of her own rebellious, carnal fantasies. Each garment is luxurious, symbolic, and narratively purposeful.

Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff undergoes an equally striking transformation. From ragged stable boy to Byronic anti-hero, his wardrobe reflects power, menace, and sensual authority. In his tailored coats and waistcoats, Elordi cuts a devastating figure: dangerous, magnetic, and undeniably alluring. These costumes are not mere spectacle; they actively drive character, emotion, and narrative momentum.

Anthony Willis’s sweeping score, punctuated by Charli XCX’s modern pulse, completes the sensory assault. Together, sound and image create a symphony of longing, lust, and heartbreak, unified by Fennell’s uncompromising vision.

Eroticism Without Apology

Fennell fully unleashes the erotic undercurrents of “Wuthering Heights”. The sexual repression of the 1800s erupts into heat, sweat, and skin-on-skin yearning; a raw portrait of romantic passion finally allowed to breathe.

The film’s eroticism is fearless yet purposeful. Shocking at times, tender at others, these moments are never gratuitous. Instead, they feel deeply rooted in character and history, as though Brontë’s own suppressed passions have been liberated. This sensuality builds empathy rather than spectacle, pulling the audience into the emotional core of the story.

Love, Humour, and Emotional Ruin

At its heart, “Wuthering Heights” is an exploration of love in all its forms: blissful, destructive, innocent, and cruel. Fennell holds nothing back, allowing each emotion to crash over the audience in waves.

Surprisingly, humour finds its way into the film at unexpected moments, offering brief flashes of levity that sharpen rather than soften the tragedy. These moments of wit remind us of Fennell’s mischievous hand and prevent the film from collapsing under its own intensity.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi: Perfectly Matched Flames

The film’s final, essential triumph lies in the incendiary pairing of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Together, they generate a magnetic, combustible intensity that defines this adaptation.

Robbie’s Catherine is wild, volatile, deeply flawed; a woman torn between sincerity and cruelty, longing and pride. She never judges the character, instead embracing her contradictions and rendering Catherine as a complex portrait of womanhood in emotional freefall.

Elordi’s Heathcliff is equally compelling: feral, vengeful, seductive, and terrifying. From rain-soaked physicality to simmering emotional menace, he embodies a dark romantic fantasy; a man driven by obsession, violence, and twisted devotion. Elordi owns every choice, marking this as another milestone in his rapidly evolving career.

Together, they are electric; a pairing that burns itself into the audience’s memory.

Final Verdict: A Valentine’s Day Reckoning

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is a wild, lust-fuelled, untamed fever dream of love in all its excess. Bold, unapologetic, and emotionally unrestrained, this is a film that taps directly into the raw, dangerous power of desire. It will shatter expectations, scandalise the faint-hearted, and leave audiences frothing, breathless, and emotionally wrecked. Let it possess you. Let it consume you. You will come undone.

Image: Warner Brothers