What is sado-masochistic love?
That’s what I googled in September 2025 after reading an article on the new “‘Wuthering Heights’” (2026) directed, produced, and written by Emerald Fennell. In this interview, she seemed to promote the movie as something shocking, visceral, and primal.
That struck me as odd, since I didn’t remember any explicit sexual scenes in the book when I’d read it so long ago. As the release date got closer, all the marketing began to showcase this Gothic tale adaptation as a sex-driven tragedy with visuals that could make a 2014 Pinterest user cry.
Even the release date on Valentine’s Day? Come on.
Confused (and concerned) about what I thought I’d skimmed over, I turned to what I remembered. But I realized that, much like a young Fennell, I had “read” Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Yes ‒ I too can use trendy stylized quotation marks to indicate that although my eyes touched the pages, I did not in fact understand the book.
The movie itself was a crazy experience. In mere moments, I found myself thrust between heavily stylized (and pretty) visuals, not-so-subtle visual metaphors, an oddly used shock factor, and an awesome score interrupted by weird montages soundtracked by out-of-place songs (sorry, Charli XCX). The dialogue was okay, but at times I would get slapped in the face by the direct quotes of the book and be reminded how pointed Brontë’s prose in the novel is. At some points, I had to question what I was even watching. Although beautiful, the film lacked any real substance to cling to. I will add that the haunting performance of “Dark Eyed Sailor” was a great, surprising period piece.
The story itself felt abbreviated, cut and trimmed to neatly fit the “tragic” romance of our main characters. I was especially bummed because one of the best parts that makes this Gothic novel unique was that Brontë’s ending was more complex than simply stopping halfway through the plot.
Since I was familiar with “Saltburn” (2023) and “Promising Young Woman” (2020), I knew that controversy was not something new to Fennell. In the way that any press is good press, any shock she can give her audience is something people will talk about afterward, thus achieving the goal of these conversations happening.
The most remarkable part of this movie was how well it knew its audience. In the writing process for “‘Wuthering Heights,’” Fennell said that before she started, not having read the book for a few years, she sat down and wrote everything she’d remembered ‒ quotes, book scenes, and plotlines. When it came time to compare the source material to what she’d listed, she realized that some of what she had listed had been wishful thinking on her part.
In a recent Vogue interview, she explained her goal was to “try and recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time.” Yes, the trendy stylized quotation marks were indeed a subtle disclaimer that it would be “Wuthering Heights” in the same sense that “Fifty Shades of Grey” was “Twilight.”
As a teenage girl who read the novel, I unfortunately missed all of the “extremely explicit sexual power dynamics” that she was picking up on, but then again, I’m not the one who’s doing the adaptation. The unpleasant and hazy memory of reading the book (granted it was a while ago) was something of an uncomfortably entangled family tree that commented on class resentment, otherness, power, inheritance, and generational legacies. It wasn’t a polished “which man will this spunky blond heroine pick” story romanticizing an inherently doomed toxic relationship.
Arguably one of the most tragic characters, Ellen (Nelly), in the book serves as the audience’s witness to this horrible story, is changed to be only an obstacle between the “great love” of Cathy and Heathcliff. Other columnists have spoken more in depth about the changes to her character in the film.
However, one of the most contentious points of discussion by far has been the casting of Heathcliff. As is with many previous cinematic adaptations of the novel, the interpretation of Healthcliff’s race has been under scrutiny. Some don’t care if Heathcliff is white while others like the Brontë Parsonage Museum have a Heathcliff heading under the section titled “Black History.” The casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, responded to quite rude comments by some fans saying that “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”
Fennell acknowledged the massive amount of discourse and scholarship on the subject, detailing her casting decision in that same Vogue Interview. She said, “the political dynamics of the story was certainly something that I was probably not best positioned to be the person to tell.” However, since whiteness is a constructed political and social identity, her choice to cast a white actor doesn’t remove the political dynamics at all.
But plenty of past book-to-movie adaptations have altered or added characters and gotten away with it. Why are people so furious each time? After all, Fennell has done everything to let us know that this is her adaptation, going as far as saying that Elordi looked just like the illustrations of Heathcliff in the book she’d grown up with.
If adaptations are viewed with artistic license of the creative mind, does any of this matter? Will this movie and future adaptations be able to get away with the meretricious drapery of a Gothic literary adaptation concealing a flimsy narrative plotline?
I don’t know.
In that same Vogue interview where she obfuscates the reasoning behind Heathcliff’s casting, Fennell admits that she knows “that you can’t make a straightforward adaptation of something so complicated and so personal and so brilliant.”
So then why did she? Clearly, the director was inspired to tell the tale in her own unique and artistic way. Why did she dress it in the guise of being a “Wuthering Heights” adaptation?
Perhaps, to avoid losing the meaning in adaptations, we might expand our definition from one of fidelity to one that includes artistic license. Those who are inspired by a work of art and set out to adapt it to a different medium or reimagine it in a new context have the discretion and freedom over what they produce. That’s the beauty of inspiration. However, I do also argue that it is necessary for creatives to be intentional about why portions of this story are appealing to them and what they are adapting. Purposefully cutting around central themes to the original almost defeats the purpose of adapting it (unless perhaps the changes help subvert and critically comment on the source material).
The original and adaptation can then be viewed as companion pieces, but that doesn’t mean that critical thinking stops outside the metaphorical door of the source material. Some people will definitely be watching this movie without the lens of the original. Saying the adaptation was bad doesn’t get to the deeper parts of the movie where the choices of creative liberty become under scrutiny as well.
The new work can be judged both alongside and outside the original work. This form of the adaptation, created with intentionality, becomes a way to let the story resonate with another person or different audience. It’s just important to realize which parts are resonating.
“Wuthering Heights” (2026) takes advantage of the aesthetics and narrative of the Gothic novel to market a highly romanticized and unconvincing tragic romance between two characters who are shadows of their literary counterparts. Irrelevant to the novel, this movie still leaves much to be desired emotionally and narratively. Much like its dreamy finish, the movie glosses over the themes of obsession, possession, and even the humiliation, pleasure, and pain found in sadomasochism and erratically jumps to a sudden erotic tone. At the end of it all you’re left with an empty and unsettled feeling, which is surprisingly close to how the book leaves you.
This film will no doubt be the introduction of many to Brontë’s story, maybe even inspiring some to pick up the physical book since they loved this movie so much. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Reading is good! But, after you see this movie or any of the many adaptations in theaters this year, expand your analysis to criticize both the adaptation and whether the resulting work is compelling in its own right.
