Emerald Fennell's adaptation trims the novel, recasts key figures, and reshapes character dynamics, producing a visually rich but polarizing take on Emily Brontë's classic.
The new cinematic version of Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell, has prompted strong reactions from critics and audiences alike. This adaptation focuses tightly on the youthful storm between Catherine and Heathcliff while making conspicuous choices in casting and characterization that alter the book’s original tensions. The result is a film that is extravagant in design and simultaneously contentious in interpretation, provoking debate about fidelity, race, and narrative intent.
In the paragraphs below, I break down the most consequential modifications: how the plot was compressed, which characters were changed or merged, the implications of casting decisions, and the tonal departures that shape the movie’s reception. Throughout this analysis, the emphasis is on describing what was altered and why those choices matter to readers familiar with Emily Brontë’s work.
Fennell’s version concentrates primarily on the intense, early relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff rather than attempting to adapt Emily Brontë’s full, multi-decade narrative. By excising the novel’s latter half, the movie discards the generational consequences and the cycle of revenge that govern the book’s moral landscape. The absence of the novel’s framing devices—the narrators who complicate perspective—means the film presents events more directly, reducing the readerly ambiguity that made the text morally and emotionally complex. This compression changes the work’s thematic balance: obsession becomes immediate spectacle rather than a force rippling through time.
One of the most contentious aspects of this adaptation is the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. In Brontë’s text, Heathcliff’s ambiguous but non-white description is a key driver of social friction and prejudice within the story. Casting a white actor in that role removes a layer of racial tension that historically shaped the character’s outsider status and motivations. Compounding the debate, Pakistani-British actor Shazad Latif portrays Edgar Linton, a character who is white in the novel. The inversion of expected racial dynamics alters how class and privilege read on screen and changes the implicit reasons why the lovers are kept apart.
Choosing actors irrespective of race is a defensible artistic stance, and casting diversity can yield fresh insights. However, when a source text encodes racial otherness as thematic fuel, such casting inevitably shifts meaning. Viewers and scholars are split: some see Fennell’s choices as erasing a historical subtext, while others argue the director made a deliberate reimagining that foregrounds different anxieties. Either way, the optics of who is placed in positions of sympathy and who is framed as obstacle or villain have provoked substantial discussion.
The film also reshapes several supporting players and compresses roles. Two separate characters from the novel are folded together, transforming family dynamics and reducing the structural opposition that once existed between Heathcliff and established authority. A formerly rigid, elderly servant is reinterpreted as a younger, morally ambiguous figure, and this recasting softens the film’s portrayal of generational conservatism. Such changes streamline the plot but also strip away some of the original work’s social texture.
Isabella’s portrayal is markedly different: her relationship with Heathcliff is staged with elements of consensual power play rather than the brutal domination depicted in the novel. This creative choice reframes the dynamic from straightforward abuse to something presented as mutually performed, which in turn tempers Heathcliff’s cruelty on screen. While this makes certain scenes easier for modern audiences to digest, it also reduces the moral darkness that Brontë used to critique obsession and retribution.
Visually, the film is opulent: production design and cinematography lean into romanticized, tactile imagery that often distracts from narrative ambiguity. Notably missing from the adaptation are some of the story’s most emblematic moments—scenes that encapsulate the moral ambivalence of the novel are relocated or excised, which frustrates viewers who sought those emotional payoffs. The absence of a climactic deathbed exchange and the removal of supernatural whisperings, for example, mute the eerie persistence that haunts Brontë’s book.
Reactions have split into those who appreciate a sumptuous, contemporary reinvention and those who see the film as a sanitization or misreading of the source. Critics have pointed to the director’s personal stamp—her willingness to reshape character motivations and foreground eroticism and shock—while defenders argue that every adaptation is an interpretation with the right to prioritize different themes.
Ultimately, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a deliberately partial translation of Emily Brontë’s novel: it trades certain moral complexities and historic contexts for aesthetic boldness and narrative economy. For viewers and readers, the film offers an opportunity to consider how casting, compression, and tonal shifts can remake a classic—and why some retellings will always stir fierce debate.