"Wuthering Heights" (2026)
Directed by Emerald Fennell
Tragedy strikes when Heathcliff falls in love with Catherine Earnshaw, a woman from a wealthy family in 18th-century England.
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28 films that influenced "Wuthering Heights"
What critics say influenced "Wuthering Heights"
Did Wuthering Heights aim to be Fifty Shades of Brontë?
Compared to this, “Fifty Shades of Grey” looks like a chaste after school special.
Around that same time, another piece of Twilight-influenced media, Fifty Shades of Grey, dropped, and female-gaze smut made a resurgence in the mainstream.
It's shallow fan fiction that has more in common with E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey than Brontë's unflinching portrait of obsessive love, vengeance, the violence of class, racism and generational trauma.
There are certain aspects of Wuthering Heights, that seem very reminiscent of Fifty Shades of Grey in the way that desire, power, and kink intersect.
Fennell seems to be prodding us with the imagery of erotic submission that was once the purview of Harlequin romances but has now gone mainstream in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey and the dawn of BookTok.
Her take on Wuthering Heights feels akin to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) or The Great Gatsby (2013), in the sense that it's a literary adaptation that’s more concerned with theatricality and spectacle than translating a work of classic literature to the big screen as authentically as possible.
…like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
Fennell programmed a series at the BFI IMAX of titles that inspired her version of Wuthering Heights, including Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard.
It's no more salacious than an average episode of Bridgerton.
…more akin to a Bridgerton fumble under the petticoats…
Bells and whistles are not necessary, but you get them anyway, for a Bridgerton-style effect.
…it’s Wuthering Heights for the Bridgerton generation…
…and Robert Egger’s Nosferatu…
During the promotional tour for "Nosferatu" in 2024, director Robert Eggers told The Verge that he viewed the story of "Nosferatu" as a "demon lover story," and frequently returned to one of the great demon lover stories while writing his script — Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights."
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In Fennell’s frustratingly small vision, the story of Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is reduced to simply a tragic love story, Titanic for Gen Z.
In the press, the writer-director has name-dropped James Cameron’s Titanic as a formative influence, and it’s definitely a touchstone in this Wuthering Heights’ more maudlin moments.
Fennell programmed a series at the BFI IMAX of titles that inspired her version of Wuthering Heights, including Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest and Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard.
Despite how Emerald Fennell marketed the film – the “greatest love story ever told,” in the lineage of Crash and The Handmaiden, “sexy and nightmarish”…
…essentially a “Barbie Dreamhouse” version of Brontë’s world…
It becomes a Gothic Barbie Dreamhouse (derogatory), with the costuming, though beautiful, more in keeping with an Alice in Wonderland film.
This version’s aggressive marketing push takes a leaf from the Barbie and Wicked playbook with countless brand collaborations.
The Barbie star weaponizes both her beauty and her ability to embody Cathy’s immaturity, allowing us to sympathize with a character who is often selfish and destructive.
The film traces the familiar arc of Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie, of Barbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi, of Frankenstein)…
Margot Robbie; Barbie…
Posters from the movie, like the one above, show Elordi and Robbie posed like Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind.” Both are fully clothed when Gable’s Rhett Butler tells Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara: “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.”
Heathcliff riding across the moors at sunset is pure movie star iconography (think Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind") evoking classic romantic epics while still feeling modern and dangerous.
…the director and her department heads seem to take much and more gratification from emulating the lushness of Golden Age Hollywood romances of the 1930s, including most vividly Gone with the Wind and its blood-red sunsets being transferred from Tara to north Yorkshire.
When Heathcliff overhears Cathy’s conversation with Nelly and rides off into the crimson sunset, it evokes sweeping, epic love stories like Gone With the Wind.
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This unique approach almost feels inspired by Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (1970), another film with extravagant, colorful costumes and production design that feels like a period piece but with brief flashes of modernity.
…announces a film that upends the Gothic tradition of unconsummated yearning for a full-blown, almost Ken Russell-esque celebration of sex and death.