YNOT at the Movies

The moors have rarely looked this wet, this cruel, or this inviting to ruin. Director Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" (UK/USA 2026 | 136 min.) is another adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel that has been made into films many times, and this version treats the story less as heritage drama and more as an emotional battlefield where love, jealousy, revenge, and regret are pushed to their breaking points.

The film follows Cathy Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), a headstrong and volatile young woman raised in isolation at the crumbling Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the orphan her father brings home who becomes her closest companion and eventual obsession. As they grow older, Cathy is seduced by the wealth and refinement of Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), while Heathcliff disappears and later returns transformed. Their once-inseparable bond fractures, and the consequences ripple outward, poisoning friendships, marriages, and loyalties. Watching from the edges is Nelly (Hong Chau), Cathy's childhood companion, whose presence hovers over much of the drama.

The film strikingly incorporates the Yorkshire landscape to full effect, with rain lashing against faces, fog swallowing bodies, and wind scouring the moors. There are an extraordinary number of close-ups, faces filling the frame, skin gleaming with rain or tears, breath and texture magnified to utmost intimacy. The result is frequently breathtaking, a tactile, immersive experience where emotion feels carved into stone and mud.

But the film's emphasis on provocation sometimes interferes with its storytelling. The flirtations with BDSM imagery feel more designed to shock or provoke a chuckle than to deepen our understanding of the characters. The central romance, despite committed performances from Robbie and Elordi, never fully convinces. Heathcliff is initially presented as disheveled and almost vagrant in appearance, which makes his later transformation into a wealthy, well-groomed gentleman feel not just dramatic but strategic. One cannot help but wonder: if he had not returned rich and polished, would Cathy's passion have reignited with the same force? The film never quite grapples with that uncomfortable question.

More crucially, the transition from childhood friendship to adult, all-consuming love is never convincingly realized. We are told their bond is elemental, that they are halves of the same being, but the emotional evolution between those stages feels abrupt rather than inevitable. The film insists on epic passion; it does not always earn it.

Hong Chau's Nelly, meanwhile, is given frustratingly little to do. For such a pivotal figure in the novel's architecture, and for an actor of Chau's depth, the role feels reduced to a peripheral observer, a wasted opportunity in a film otherwise so attentive to aesthetic detail.

After more than two hours of running time, the film is most persuasive as a spectacle. It is filled with beautiful images and a charged atmosphere, a storm you can almost taste. As a love story, however, it remains more impressive than persuasive, its emotional thunder rumbling loudly without ever quite striking home.

"Wuthering Heights" opens in theaters on Friday, February 13, 2026.