Hollywood is out of ideas, and honestly, I’m not even mad about it anymore. I’m just tired. We’ve reached the point in the cultural lifecycle where we take a 177-year-old novel about toxic obsession and turn it into a high-gloss, sweat-drenched thirst trap. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights isn’t so much a movie as it is a two-hour Pinterest board for people who think trauma is an aesthetic.
It stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Of course it does. Because if you’re spending a rumored $80 million on a period piece, you don’t hire actors who look like they’ve actually spent a day outside in the Yorkshire wind. You hire the two most symmetrical human beings on the planet and tell them to look miserable in expensive linen. It’s a cynical move, but in the attention economy, it’s probably the only move that makes sense.
The early word is that the film is "dark" and a "deliciously complex erotica." Translation: there’s a lot of heavy breathing and very little eye contact. Fennell, who gave us the bathtub-slurping antics of Saltburn, seems to have realized that the internet doesn’t want a faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s bleak, class-conscious tragedy. The internet wants to watch Elordi brood in a way that makes them forget he’s playing a character originally described as a "dark-skinned gipsy."
That’s the first real point of friction. The casting of Elordi as Heathcliff is a choice that feels less like a creative vision and more like a spreadsheet error. Brontë was pretty specific about Heathcliff’s "otherness"—his status as an outsider was central to his rage. By casting a six-foot-five Australian heartthrob who looks like he just walked off a cologne shoot, the movie buffs out all the interesting edges of the source material. It trades historical subtext for raw, unadulterated horniness.
It’s erotica, sure. But is it complex? Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw with a jagged, frantic energy that almost saves the movie from its own slickness. She’s great. She’s always great. But she’s stuck in a film that treats the moors like a fashion runway. The "darkness" the critics are raving about isn't the soul-crushing despair of 19th-century poverty; it’s just the color grading. Everything is teal and orange, or deep, moody shadows designed to make Elordi’s jawline look like it could cut glass.
The film leans hard into the "toxic" label. We love toxicity now. We package it up, put a bow on it, and call it "delicious." The screenplay strips away the generational weight of the novel—the kids, the property disputes, the slow rot of a family line—and focuses entirely on the central obsession. It’s a vibe-based adaptation. It’s for the generation that grew up on fanfic and wants their classics served with a side of ruinous intimacy.
There’s a specific trade-off happening here. We lose the grit of the original book—the smell of peat, the actual dirt under the fingernails—and we gain a hyper-stylized version of longing that plays well on a smartphone screen. The movie is designed for the TikTok edit. You can practically see the individual frames that will be slowed down and set to a Lana Del Rey remix.
Fennell is a smart director. She knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows that by making Wuthering Heights "erotic," she’s tapping into a market that is currently starved for big-budget adult dramas that aren't about capes or multiverses. But there’s a hollowness to it. When the credits roll, you aren't left thinking about the cruelty of the British class system or the cycle of abuse. You’re just thinking about how good those two people looked while they were destroying each other’s lives.
It’s a movie for an age where we’ve traded depth for texture. We don’t want to feel the characters' pain; we just want to watch them feel it while looking incredible. It’s high-end content, perfectly calibrated for the algorithm, and scrubbed clean of any actual danger.
If this is the future of the literary adaptation, then fine. Let’s stop pretending we’re honoring the classics and just admit we want to see pretty people be mean to each other in 4K. It’s easier that way.
Does it matter if it’s "good" in the traditional sense? Probably not. It’ll trend for a weekend, trigger a dozen think-pieces about the "female gaze," and then disappear into the endless scroll of the streaming library.
Who actually needs a soul when you have lighting this good?