Emerald Fennell’s much-anticipated adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is finally here. The film has sparked reams of divisive discourse since the director teased the project on X back in July 2024: some were concerned about just how much Fennell would deviate from the canonical text, while others were intrigued to see what the controversial filmmaker would do with the emotionally devastating masterpiece. Now it’s out in the world, critics are still polarised: the Independent gave it a one-star rating, the Telegraph five. Personally, I’m more inclined to agree with the former review.

Let’s start with the good. If the film has any saving grace, it comes in the form of its strong cast. Jacob Elordi is a veritable chameleon: it’s easy to forget that the gruff stable boy on screen is played by the same person who starred as posho Felix in Saltburn. Despite her best efforts, the same can’t be said for Margot Robbie, who is plainly a Hollywood star and not a spiky Northern lass. But Owen Cooper and Charlotte Mellington are entirely convincing as younger iterations of Heathcliff and Cathy: when the pair get into a spirited argument about Heathcliff’s illiteracy, which escalates as one attempts to match the vim of the other, it’s difficult not to hear Brontë’s “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” echoing round your mind.

And now for the bad. I’ll start at the start: the opening screen is black, overlaid with erotic-sounding creaking and panting. But then we cut to a public hanging – the creaking is the twist of a gallows rope, the panting a criminal drawing his last breaths. As he struggles, he sucks the burlap sack over his head into his mouth, evoking a gimp mask. A young onlooker shrieks about the dying man’s “stiffy”. Right from the off, we’re told – not shown – that this is a story about desire and death. This is classic Fennell: she can’t do subtlety, instead preferring to bludgeon the audience over the head with hollow symbols.

Then there’s the Heathcliff of it all. Many baulked at the idea of casting a white man in a canonically ethnically ambiguous role – and rightly so. While Elordi is convincing, a Heathcliff who isn’t a “dark-skinned gipsy” just doesn’t make sense; his being perceived as racially impure is fundamental to his character. It also doesn’t help that in this adaptation, the Earnshaws’ eldest son Hindley – who, in the novel, torments Heathcliff about both his race and social status – is scrubbed out of existence entirely.  Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes, for some reason) absorbs Hindley’s vices of gambling and drinking, and is often violent towards Heathcliff when drunk, but there’s never any suggestion that Earnshaw is resentful of Heathcliff like Hindley is. It’s a choice which obscures the reasons for Heathcliff’s vengefulness and consequently robs the narrative of any real emotional thrust.

Fennell doesn’t just omit aspects of the novel, but inserts moments entirely of her own creation – not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to adaptations, but Fennell doesn’t have the chops to pull it off. For example: Fennell bastardises Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver – who, with her brown hair and baby face, really should have been Cathy), turning her into a ribbons-obsessed ditz who babbles like a precocious toddler. Heathcliff, in this adaptation, is not straightforwardly her abuser, either: instead, the pair seem to be in a consensual BDSM relationship, with Isabella apparently willing to be degraded – Elordi’s Heathcliff keeps her chained up like a dog – and used as a vehicle for her husband to spite Cathy.

Quite why Fennell chose to do this, I don’t know. To me, Isabella’s contentedness with the whole set-up seems to undermine the point Brontë makes in the novel about how there is often collateral damage left in the trail of obsessive, all-consuming love (especially as we’re never introduced to the second generation of characters in the film; in the novel, by contrast, they’re the ones left to deal with the fallout of Cathy and Heathcliff’s doomed affair). The idea of Heathcliff having any sort of intimate relationship with Isabella also seems to dampen the idea that his love for Cathy is entirely singular, which again lessens the drama of what should be, well, a capital-D drama.

The whole thing feels like Warner Bros has generously indulged a GCSE drama student

On that note: while in the novel, Heathcliff and Cathy never consummate their love, Fennell permits the lovers to commit out-and-out adultery. There’s a whole montage of the pair going at it: on the moors, in a carriage, on tables, in Heathcliff’s ramshackle bed (even after he is master of Wuthering Heights, he prefers to still sleep in the stables outside, so as to better pretend that Cathy is still in her room – a detail that, I will grant, was quite touching). But, again, this cheapens the tragedy of Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship; her death doesn’t hit as hard knowing that the couple have had the luxury of spending whole afternoons whispering sweet nothings to one another.

This is especially important as Fennell chooses to conclude her adaptation at the point of Cathy’s death. As the climax of the whole narrative, it’s a moment which should be devastating – but given that the couple are afforded a brief period of happiness, it registers as a damp squib. I couldn’t help but notice that everyone in the screening I attended lingered for around a minute after the credits began rolling, as if waiting for more film, or at the very least a post-credits scene to offer a more satisfying conclusion.

Watching a good film can often raise more questions than it answers. My favourite things to watch are the kinds of things which stay with me for days or months or years afterwards, which offer interesting perspectives on complex quandaries. But the questions I asked myself during Wuthering Heights were not questions like “Can love transcend societal structures and pressures?” or “Are some things truly unforgivable?”. More like: “Why am I watching a hanging man get an erection?”, “Are those meant to be leeches?”,  and “Why is the floor red?”. Fennell has attempted to swat away criticism like this by arguing that she wanted to recreate the vision of the story she had when reading the book as a 14-year-old girl – and it tracks that this is her ‘excuse’ for the film, because the whole thing feels like Warner Bros has generously indulged a GCSE drama student.

Well, as they say, the third time’s the charm. Maybe now people will finally see Fennell as she truly is: not a whip-smart auteur, but a professional ragebaiter.