Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights Brings Brontë to the Screen

Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights arrived on Canal+ on September 22, 2026, reigniting debate around one of English literature's most enduring and ferocious novels. As covered by Numéro ahead of the Canal+ premiere↗, Margot Robbie was in Paris promoting the film — a Warner Bros. production that has drawn as much controversy as commercial attention since its theatrical release earlier in the year.

The film, which Wikipedia confirms↗) premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on January 28, 2026, and opened in the UK and US on February 13, grossed $242 million worldwide against an $80 million production budget — a clear commercial success despite the mixed critical reception. Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff, with a supporting cast that includes Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, and Ewan Mitchell.

Fennell has been unusually candid about her intentions. As the Los Angeles Times reported↗, she set out to "recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time" — a subjective, emotionally driven ambition that explains both the film's appeal and its divisiveness. Where Emily Brontë's novel contains what the LA Times describes as "mere glimmers of physical intimacy," Fennell's adaptation is explicitly erotic, with steamy scenes drawn not from the source text but from what Fennell calls "the book of my head" — her own imaginative response to reading it as a young woman.

That creative licence has proven contentious on multiple fronts. Critics and devoted readers of Brontë's novel took issue before the film even released: Heathcliff is repeatedly described in the novel as non-white, yet Fennell cast Elordi — her collaborator from Saltburn — in the role. Others have argued that reducing Brontë's dense social critique to a romantic drama strips the work of the very qualities that made it revolutionary. Brontë's novel, first published in 1847, is a transgressive text — violent, psychologically complex, and deeply uncomfortable. Staging it primarily as a sweeping love story is itself an interpretive choice with real consequences for how the source material is understood.

Fennell has defended her decisions throughout the promotional cycle. On the explicit scenes, she has been direct: they are, in her framing, a faithful rendering of what the novel implies rather than what it states. "They're part of the book of all of our heads," she told The Times, as quoted by the LA Times. Some readers, however, reject the conflation of personal fantasy with authorial intent — particularly when the resulting film carries Brontë's name as its title.

The Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights — featuring an introduction by Brontë scholar Pauline Nestor and a new preface by Lucasta Miller — is the text against which adaptations are most commonly measured. As the LA Times noted↗, Nestor's introduction observes that many literary critics read the novel's second half as signifying something quite specific about order, inheritance, and social restoration — dimensions that erotic, aestheticised adaptations tend to sideline. Nestor's scholarly framing is a useful corrective: the novel is not simply a love story with Gothic atmosphere. It is Emily Brontë's only novel, and it has always resisted comfortable categorisation.

Fennell is not the first director to wrestle with this resistance. The history of Wuthering Heights on screen is a history of filmmakers choosing which version of the novel to tell — and those choices always reveal as much about the adapter's moment as about Brontë's text. What distinguishes Fennell's approach is the degree to which she has foregrounded her own subjectivity as the interpretive lens, making the film as much a document of how a contemporary filmmaker experienced the novel as it is a retelling of it. Whether that constitutes creative boldness or critical evasion is a question the film's mixed reviews have not resolved.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights remains one of the most celebrated and argued-over works in English literature — a story of obsession, revenge, and doomed passion on the Yorkshire moors that continues to attract bold reimaginings precisely because its depths are so difficult to exhaust. Want the full verdict? Read our review of Wuthering Heights for a closer look at the Penguin Classics edition and what makes this novel worth returning to.