Film Review: Wuthering Heights 咆哮山莊 (2026) - USA / UK
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
There is a moment early in Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” when the camera lingers on the back of Jacob Elordi’s neck—dirty, slick with sweat, veins bulging as he chops wood with the kind of violence that suggests he’s murdering the tree rather than merely trimming it. This shot, perhaps four seconds long, tells you everything you need to know about the film. It is not interested in the moors as a spiritual landscape or a brooding Romantic canvas. It treats them as a mud-wrestling arena for the unleashed id. This is precisely what you would expect from the director of Saltburn: gorgeous, deeply sweaty, and intentionally provocative.
If you approach as a Brontë purist hoping for a reverent translation of Emily Brontë’s novel, you will likely leave clutching your pearls, muttering about desecration. But if you’re open to a feverish Gothic-erotic remix that plays like Euphoria dressed in corsets and mud, there is a strange, compulsive power here—even if “love” feels too tame a word for the feral transaction between these two beautiful disasters.
Fennell has never been a filmmaker of restraint, and that quality is both the movie’s rocket fuel and its occasional undoing. Shot on 35mm VistaVision, the Yorkshire Dales have rarely looked so tactile and alive. This is not the soft, misty, watercolor England of Merchant-Ivory. It is high-contrast, visceral, almost oppressively physical. You can practically smell the damp wool, feel the grit under fingernails, and sense the bone-deep ache of drafty rooms and repressed desire. Fennell turns the traditional grey, drizzly atmosphere into something hotter and more pressurized, turning the Earnshaw home into a petri dish for obsession.
The boldest stroke may be the Charli XCX-heavy soundtrack—an anachronistic choice so cheeky it should collapse under its own audacity, yet it somehow lands. The pulsing, hyper-pop synths do not politely underscore the period drama; they sit on top of it like a teenager’s racing heartbeat. When the bass drops during one of Catherine and Heathcliff’s screaming matches, it feels less like a gimmick and more like the sound of two hearts trying to claw their way out of their ribcages. It captures the immature, irrational, all-consuming nature of their passion better than any tasteful string quartet ever could.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi bring undeniable chemistry, crackling and dangerous. Robbie plays Catherine as no helpless romantic but as a feral architect of chaos—fully aware of the societal cage and choosing to bang against its bars until they (or she) break. Elordi’s Heathcliff is a brooding physical presence, a walking threat who seems one slight away from detonation. He is less the mysterious, racially ambiguous outcast of the novel and more a smoldering modern heartthrob, which works for the film’s sensual purposes but occasionally softens the character’s darker, more pathetic edges. Fennell seems a bit too enamored with her leading man’s beauty to let him be truly monstrous.
The quiet revelation is Hong Chau as Nelly Dean. She grounds the entire enterprise as the weary voice of sanity—the only one doing actual work while the beautiful lunatics wail and scheme. Her silent, exhausted reactions to the escalating melodrama provide the film’s sharpest humor and most human moments. She watches these people the way we watch a slow-motion car crash: horrified, yet transfixed.
Where the film wobbles is in its occasional worship of style over substance. The commitment to a pop-Gothic, hyper-sensual aesthetic sometimes sacrifices the novel’s deeper existential dread for Instagram-ready misery. At 136 minutes, the second half accelerates as if Fennell grew impatient with consequences and preferred to linger on aesthetically pleasing torment. The meta framing device—complete with literal quotation marks around the title—cleverly signals this is a version, not the definitive one, but it can also feel like a preemptive defense against purists.
“Wuthering Heights” is a bold, messy, often thrilling reimagining that treats Brontë’s masterpiece not as sacred text but as dangerous, illicit fuel. It is Saltburn on the moors—sweaty, indulgent, and unafraid to be ridiculous. It confuses intensity for profundity at times and is hollow in places, but it is never boring. It is a spectacle of raw, messy feeling. (Neo, 2026)