Commodifying Cruelty: Romanticising Abuse And Reframing “Wuthering Heights” (2026) In The Age Of Spectacle

Photo by nidan via Pixabay (licensed under the Pixabay Content Licence)

Since the release of its first trailer, “Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026) has made one thing clear: this is not a story about love conquering all, nor even about love consuming everything; rather, it is about the romanticisation and commodification of abuse shrouded under the pretense of love. Calling it an adaptation of Wuthering Heights would be an overstatement; many critics and devoted readers of Brontë’s text have noted, with considerable displeasure, the erasure of racial politics and the romanticisation of abuse. The film’s title, conspicuously enclosed in quotation marks and marketed as justification for director Emerald Fennell’s vision—an interpretation filtered through her adolescent sensibilities—signals this departure from the outset. In trading the novel’s preoccupations with abuse, class, race, and moral corruption for glossy spectacle, Fennell delivers a film that is visually sumptuous and intermittently compelling, but ultimately far more interested in sex than in the corrosive, vicious dynamics that made the original endure.

Fennell’s third film follows the critical success of Saltburn (2023) and Promising Young Woman (2020). And yet, despite the emotional and thematic complexity of both, “Wuthering Heights” appears to have missed the mark, mistaking provocation for depth. The first half of the film shows real promise: the pacing is tight, relationships develop with satisfying inevitability, and the early exploration of domestic entrapment, abuse, and patriarchal authority gestures toward the feminist struggles embedded in Brontë’s original text. Even Fennell’s inclusion of Cathy’s attempt to secure marriage as an escape from an abusive, alcoholic father suggests a film willing to interrogate survival within patriarchy and rigid class hierarchies, while the revelation that Nelly is the illegitimate daughter of an unnamed lord lays the groundwork for a potentially incisive commentary on class mobility and social liminality. However, that thread is, almost literally, thrown to the wind. What begins as a study of repression and self-destruction dissolves into a sequence of BDSM-inflected sex and masturbation scenes that feel less transgressive than performative. Explicit? Yes, but dramatically contrived.

However, there is no denying that the film is visually stunning. The colour grading during the montage of Cathy’s married life glows with a decadent artificiality, and Anthony Willis’ score, alongside Charli XCX’s songs, underscores this lush atmosphere. Through lingering long shots that isolate Cathy within the opulent Linton household, sweeping pans across the Yorkshire moors, and cinematic chiaroscuro lighting that heighten the contrast between intimacy and isolation, the film achieves a fever-dream ambience that might have succeeded as a dazzling, romantic spectacle were it not an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Jacqueline Durran’s polarising costumes amplify this effect: Cathy’s increasingly extravagant silhouettes and saturated crimson palette signal passion, repression, and the conspicuous wealth of the Lintons. Yet there are moments when the aesthetic excess tips into caricature, rendering Cathy more a Victorian Barbie than a product of abuse, patriarchy, and obsession.

Yet, for all its aesthetic daring, the film largely sidesteps the novel’s racial and class tensions. Any gestures toward class conflict in the first act are faint and underdeveloped. The removal of Hindley, whose abuse is central to Heathcliff’s character development and the novel’s exploration of power and hierarchy, dilutes the novel’s social tensions, while the decision to cast Jacob Elordi as the racially ambiguous Heathcliff sparked controversy from the moment it was announced. Rather than foregrounding his outsider status and the racialised hostility that shapes his brutality, the film reframes him as a brooding, commercialised object of desire. Even figures such as Joseph are softened into near-likeability.

Violence and “true love” collapse into one another, echoing the commodification of dark romance currently dominating screens and literature, where obsessive, destructive relationships have been repackaged as seductive spectacle and marketable angst. However, rather than interrogating sexual transgression as a site of empowerment or autonomy, the film treats humiliation as aesthetic currency. The sequence involving Isabella Linton is particularly troubling. In Brontë’s novel, Isabella ultimately leaves Heathcliff after recognising the extent of the abuse she has endured, choosing survival for herself and her son. Here, however, the emphasis on self-inflicted BDSM practices of degradation reframes her suffering as spectacle. In the current feminist climate, one increasingly attentive to issues of consent, representation, and the ways entertainment media can normalise coercion, the choice does not feel daring, rather regressive. Crucially, the film fails to depict female sexual transgression as liberatory. Isabella and Cathy are not granted meaningful autonomy through their boundary-breaking, and their agency remains tethered to obsessive love and marriage. What might have been an exploration of desire as defiance instead curdles into sexual humiliation masquerading as depth.

This thematic muddiness is not entirely unprecedented in Fennell’s work. Despite the acclaim surrounding Saltburn and Promising Young Women, both films attracted criticism for their handling of class and gender politics. For some, Saltburn read as less as a subversive satire for privilege than as a tale of upper-class victimhood at the hands of a cunning outsider, blurring its critique of wealth and hierarchy. Meanwhile, Promising Young Woman was criticised for being a digestible, almost sanitised addition to the rape-revenge genre as its conclusion delivered legal justice instead of systemic reckoning and left two women dead in the process. In this light, “Wuthering Heights” feels less like an anomaly: a film drawn to incendiary themes of sex, class and gender, yet hesitant to pursue them further beyond their surface shock.

However, the true failing of “Wuthering Heights” lies in its unwillingness to offer anything genuinely new. We are, perhaps, well past the cultural moment where explicit sex alone can pass for provocation. The shock value has dulled, and what remains feels curiously dated. The omission of the novel’s second half, a section frequently sacrificed in screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights, further positions this film as just another iteration: more polished, glamorous and decidedly raunchier than its predecessors, yet reluctant to meaningfully reinterpret its source material. The whirlwind sexual crescendo ultimately achieves little. Cathy’s fate is preordained and her death carries no tragic inevitability when the emotional groundwork has been hollowed out. 

Gothic literature thrives on transgression and repression: on the past’s refusal to remain buried. Strip away those tensions, and what remains is superficial. Here, the Gothic is reduced to aesthetic texture: wind-swept moors, crimson palettes, feverish bodies, a dark synth-pop soundtrack. Its spirit—moral rot, psychological cruelty, generational obsession—is conspicuously, and regrettably, absent. In the end, while “Wuthering Heights” may dazzle the eye, it hollowly fails to evoke Brontë’s corrosive psychological and social commentary in favour of lavish spectacle, sexualised shock, and aestheticised cruelty. 

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Edited by Hannah Tang, Co-Editor of Film & TV