By EVAN FERNANDEZ/Staff Writer
Valentine’s Day this year delivered a failed reimagining of the 19th-century romance classic, “Wuthering Heights.”
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi team up with director Emerald Fennell to retell the nearly 200-year-old tale of Heathcliff and Cathy. The film is set against the isolated, storm-lashed Yorkshire moors of northern England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It follows Cathy and her childhood love, Heathcliff, as their devotion to one another slowly curdles into something far more rotten and malevolent.
While the original “Wuthering Heights” written by Emily Brontë has always been unsettling, even abrasive, this adaptation feels strangely like they didn’t read the book. The novel is not a sweeping romance in the traditional sense. It’s a story about obsession, ego, revenge and emotional destruction masquerading as love.
Heathcliff and Cathy are chaotic, selfish and often cruel. This film seems to lose them in the stylization of it all, and we no longer see them as Cathy and Heathcliff but as Jacob and Margot playing 1800s dress-up.
Fennell’s filmmaking style leans heavily into abstraction and aesthetic excess. We saw that in “Saltburn,” where camp and heightened surrealism felt intentional. Here, however, that same approach works against the material. The set design and costuming often feel untethered from the period, making the timeline and setting confusing rather than immersive.
While creative liberties can refresh classic texts, this reinterpretation drifts so far from the novel’s emotional core that the story begins to collapse under its own aesthetic weight.
Wuthering Heights struggles with performance. The actors never fully disappear into their roles, which is fatal for a period piece that relies on emotional immersion. Instead of seeing Cathy and Heathcliff, we remain aware that we are watching Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. That detachment makes it difficult to invest in the psychological chaos that defines Brontë’s
The true standout of the project hides in its music.
Charli XCX created a full companion album for the film, and in many ways, it succeeds where the adaptation fails. The album stands firmly on its own while also deepening the emotional themes the film only gestures toward. Early reviews even suggested the soundtrack surpasses the movie itself, and it’s hard to disagree.
Drawing influence from period instrumentation, Charli incorporates sweeping strings and live arrangements throughout tracks like “Wall of Sound” and “Always Everywhere.” The music leans into the darkness and emotional volatility that defines the original 1847 novel. In doing so, it captures the obsessive, destructive energy of Heathcliff and Cathy more effectively than the screenplay ever does.
Charli has described the album as a sister project to “True Romance,” and that lineage is noticeable in tracks like “Chains of Love” and “Dying for You.” Features from John Cale, who delivers a haunting spoken-word segment on “House,” and Sky Ferreira on “Eyes of the World” add even more depth. The soundtrack expands the story emotionally, offering nuance and intensity that the film visually gestures toward but never earns.
Ultimately, this adaptation raises a larger question about modern interpretations of classic literature. Why do contemporary filmmakers feel compelled to aestheticize stories until they become unrecognizable? Wuthering Heights is not meant to be polished or pretty; it is raw, toxic and psychologically brutal. By smoothing those edges into glossy spectacles, the film strips away what made the novel stand the test of time in the first place.
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