Wuthering Heights
Release date: 13 February 2026 (UK)
Director: Emerald Fennell
Starring: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi
Story by: Emily Brontë
Running time: 2h 16m
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s catch up time! We saw this one a grand total of SIX weeks ago, and then I wrote this review about four weeks ago, but a) the wheels have very much come off since then and b) time has no meaning. They showed Wuthering Heights again the week after, which I think only proves my second point.
This is one of those films I feel like we knew was coming several years ahead of time – my GOODNESS it was a relentless publicity campaign. At some point during release week I’m fairly sure I got algorithmed an ad for a posh leather bound notebook tie in product sort of thing, and such is the power of these campaigns I actually briefly considered buying it.
Important to note that Margot has recently had a baby and this is therefore not acting
As a novelist (I feel increasingly hopeless about the use of that term but now is not the time to examine that feeling too closely) I think this is another one I am contractually obliged to hate. I did once read Wuthering Heights, as a very pretentious pre teen tasked with reading a ‘nineteenth century novel’ over the summer holidays by an ambitious English teacher. Of course I picked this one, of COURSE I did. My memory is of not understanding a single thing that was going on, and finding the vernacular language really annoying. I can’t even remember if I finished it, but I do remember reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling immediately afterwards – a much more teen friendly choice, though not, I now realise, without its own problematic Stuff.
Anyway, I was very much prepared to have no problem with messing around with the plot/characters/themes because really, what’s the point of making your own version of something if you just preserve it in aspic? I find the ‘but they didn’t have taffeta in 1865’ brigade incredibly boring, really. Unfortunately, that is also how I found this film, because my goodness what was the point? No one is a real person, everyone floats around looking fabulous and having, to be honest, quite unerotic sex, and then it sort of ends. (The lack of eroticism may be something to do with the fact we were in a room full of screaming babies, so perhaps don’t read too much into that.)
I’m sure there’s something very wrong with this look and I really don’t care
When I talk to people about this film now, I say something like ‘it feels like a film made for the Instagram age’, which always makes people lean in and nod sagely. That sounds like… something doesn’t it? I’m not sure quite what I mean, except that most of the chat surrounding the film has been about visual things – the costumes, the sets, the giant strawberry, the weird shiny dress, Margot’s hair, the weird skin wall – and most of these things can be represented by a photograph. They’re not actually about people, or feelings, or any of the stuff cinema is usually about. They’re…kind of joyless. I feel like you could have experienced much of this film as a series of stills with a soundtrack and it would have had much the same impact. More than that, I feel like it’s all so visually stunning and totally hollow that you could have made it with AI and had just as much impact. Which feels deeply, soul crushingly depressing.
But maybe that’s just my current, deeply sleep deprived state. I think when we saw this film we were still in the thick of it, winter wise, so the mist and rain and fug was all a bit too on the nose. I’m sitting in the sunshine today, and warmer days are on their way.
Cheer up Jacob, you could always read the book
Good things: Martin Clunes! Martin Clune’s extraordinary teeth!
Bad things: Ugh I can’t even be bothered
My review: Utterly, soul crushingly pointless
Lily’s review: 0 poos
Next week: They showed it again, the utter bastards!