Longing for Moor

Emerald Fennell’s sexed-up take on Emily Brontë’s gothic romance feels empty.

By Eric NewmanMarch 14, 2026

• Film

• Fiction

EMERALD FENNELL’S Wuthering Heights (2026) could have been a great Charli XCX music video. It could have been a modern retelling, one that would force us to confront our culture’s attachment to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel and ask why, after nearly two centuries, readers still cherish the story of two people tearing each other apart as a model of “real” love. It could have leaned into camp and gifted us, in this dark hour, a zany vision of the moors à la Striptease (1996). It could have taken the bent of its clear references to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) or Moulin Rouge! (2001) and given us a fun take on a well-worn tale.

Instead, what Fennell has done is force-fed this adaptation with fistfuls of grocery store sheet cake, perhaps hoping that, in the haze of its sex-laden and stylish sugar rush, the audience won’t notice how boring it all feels.

Fennell’s characteristic maximalism, on display in her previous features, Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023), is deployed throughout the film. The writer-director pulls out all the stops—hot people having sex; hot people having kinky sex; costuming and high-contrast, saturated sets that make many scenes appear ripped from the pages of a high-fashion editorial—but the movie feels at once empty and dated for all that flash and bang(ing). The disappointment so many have felt after seeing Wuthering Heights may be yet another index of heterosexual romance’s moment of crisis, what so-called heteropessimists identify as straight relationships becoming démodé, cringe, and undesirable. Perhaps, but the film’s root problem is a much simpler one. Wuthering Heights feels empty and disappointing because, in making her sweeping love story, Emerald Fennell has neglected the very things that make us cling to romance in the first place.

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Sex is central to the romance genre. These stories aren’t called “bodice rippers” for nothing, nor is the iconic allure of 1990s cover model Fabio, with his bare chest and flowing hair, an advertisement for the right conditioner and training splits. Romance consumers want sex, but they also want that sex to tell a story. Fennell has a chokehold on the first insight but never grasps the second.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights opens at the scene of a hanging. Our protagonist, a young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), and her companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen) stare up in fascinated glee at the wriggling body of a man whose face is covered. Things kick into gear when a nearby boy calls attention to the hanged man’s growing erection, the camera zooming in so its stark impression, straining against the taut fabric of his pants, fills the screen. As the execution nears its climax, so does the crowd: a nun licks her lips and rolls her eyes toward heaven, couples passionately kiss, and the whole giddy mass swirls in ecstasy. Death and violence are potent erotic charges, the scene screams at the audience, but this disappointing foreplay doesn’t produce anything coherent or even titillating. We’re just staring at a hard-on, which isn’t very sexy at all.

This is true of much of the sex throughout the film, which unrolls as a lot of rustling and grunting, signifying nothing. Let’s take as an example adult Catherine’s (Margot Robbie) moment of sexual awakening. Crawling into Heathcliff’s (Jacob Elordi) loft above the stables in search of her petulant friend, she spies servants Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and Zillah (Amy Morgan) in a bit of jockeying role-play. Joseph puts a horse bridle over Zillah’s head, and Catherine watches them get down to kinky business through the floorboards in shocked fascination. Heathcliff suddenly appears, lying on top of her and covering her eyes and mouth with his hands. This act, ostensibly meant to shield Catherine from the primal scene, only increases her arousal. When Catherine runs off the next day to furiously masturbate in the moors, Heathcliff follows her, grabs her hand, and shoves her wet fingers into his mouth. Now, licking his lips, he triumphantly coos that he’s got her scent.

Fennell is signaling that this isn’t going to be your mother’s Wuthering Heights. But it feels a bit awkward and purposeless, recalling for fans of Saltburn the oral sex scene between Oliver (Barry Keoghan) and Venetia (Alison Oliver) that’s punctuated by the line “I’m a vampire.” These encounters feel like precocious teen provocation, in all its try-hard goofiness, without telling us anything about the characters.

That hollowness echoes even more deeply in Fennell’s handling of the film’s kinkier scenes featuring Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver), the strange, bookish young woman who becomes Catherine’s sister-in-law after Catherine marries Isabella’s brother Edgar (Shazad Latif). When we first meet her, Isabella is making dolls out of hair she has collected from Catherine’s comb, but when Heathcliff returns from his travels, looking like, well, Jacob Elordi—with posh clothes, a chestnut mop top, and a glinting gold tooth—she ditches the dolls for a shot at the hot new owner of the Wuthering Heights estate.

Here, Fennell’s adaptation takes one of its most marked departures from Brontë’s original. The canon version of Isabella falls for the rake’s gambit in classical fashion, realizing only after they’re married that she has made a horrible mistake: in a letter to Nelly, she explains that Heathcliff abuses her physically and mentally. In Fennell’s version, Heathcliff is bizarrely retrofitted as a consent king, telling Isabella from the jump that he will abuse her and that he’s only pursuing her to take revenge on Catherine. Isabella gladly accepts these terms, conspiring with Heathcliff to write letters about her degradation to Nelly (Hong Chau), and gleefully allowing herself to be chained up and treated like a dog. (This kinky turn may be a reparative homage to a dark moment in the novel when Heathcliff hangs Isabella’s dog in front of her, with Fennell likely guessing it would be a tough sell to get audiences to pine after a dog killer, no matter what Kristi Noem’s fans tell you.)

Yet with all the liberties taken amid the barks and yelps, what are these scenes helping us understand about Isabella? That she’s a kinkster? To what end? Like Heathcliff’s tongue, searching out Catherine’s mouth like a desperate worm, the sexy provocation fails to find its mark.

Sexual storytelling is the lifeblood of a gripping romance, and Fennell manages to fumble it while recent TV shows and films have succeeded. Take, for example, the sex scenes in Jacob Tierney’s series Heated Rivalry (2025– ), a reverent adaptation of Rachel Reid’s early Game Changers novels: the show follows two closeted hockey players whose decade-long situationship turns into a committed, life- and potentially sport-altering relationship. The sex scenes are there to grab our attention, to be sure, but they’re also an opportunity to articulate all the things Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) cannot say aloud, to themselves or each other. When Shane fingers himself on a bed in a Vegas hotel room, with Ilya observing imperiously from a chair, we’re watching Shane shove his shame aside and give up the rigid self-control that has made him one of the best players in the league. Ilya is so turned on that he rushes over to the bed—and Shane’s eager mouth—giving the audience an erotic iteration of their on-the-ice rivalry, a dance between domination and submission, winning and losing, that isn’t as reductive as who tops and who bottoms. As the episodes progress, so does the sex, becoming less hurried and frenetic as Ilya and Shane’s feelings for each other deepen. In one linchpin sex scene, merely saying each other’s first names betrays that depth of feeling, and the threat it poses to their lives, sending Shane into a transformative spiral. Those hookups and tuna melts are punching above their narrative weight, and with audiences watching these scenes again and again—a phenomenon dubbed “Reheated Rivalry”—they’re landing the blows.

If Heated Rivalry is too on the nose as a romantic comp here, consider Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme (2023), a blistering, white-knuckle ride of an erotic thriller in which Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a Black drag queen, is viciously assaulted outside a London gay club by Preston (George MacKay). When Jules, out of drag, clocks Preston at a gay sauna, he pursues a sexual relationship with him as a revenge plot, planning to post a video of them online and publicly out his basher. That plan gets complicated when the two start to fall for each other, setting up the film’s dramatic conclusion. The unfolding of their romance is marked through changes in Jules and Preston’s sexual encounters, which start out rough and angry in doggy style and evolve into a softer missionary style as Preston tries out kissing, submission, and, ultimately, the baby steps to a gay relationship. As Jules sees Preston as a wounded and complex closet case, he begins to see his attacker in a softer, more nuanced light, frustrating his desire for vengeance. Quite literally, in sex, Preston and Jules begin to face each other and themselves.

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If there’s anything we’re supposed to know about romance, and Wuthering Heights (the novel), it’s the primacy of yearning. Sex is at once the catalyst and the idealized expression of that feeling, but it’s the longing that we’re after. Brontë’s novel front-loads this aspect, using a scene in which Heathcliff calls after the ghost of his erstwhile Catherine to show the narrator and reader alike the depths of his bereft, guilt-ridden longing. Having already established this early on, Brontë takes her reader to the origins of the doomed romance to see how everything went so sensationally wrong, via a flashback story narrated by Nelly that fills the first half of the novel (and the entirety of every film adaptation).

Fennell takes a rather different approach, starting with the hanging and Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood, only to plunge quickly into their desperate, hidden desire, which, having been speed-cooked by the filmmaker, never feels earned. The film abruptly establishes the youngsters’ love for one another when teen Heathcliff (Owen Cooper) takes a whipping for Catherine’s folly; Catherine regrets (yet also, we suspect, deeply relishes) this boy’s punishment on her behalf. Fast-forward through their extended, snoozy foreplay to Fennell’s breathlessly delivered, foundational trauma: Catherine telling Nelly she’s going to marry Edgar Linton to save her family’s ruined fortunes and help Heathcliff. Heathcliff only overhears Catherine saying that marrying him would “degrade” her, and missing her declaration of love, he gallops off into a Technicolor sunset, hair catching the wind in an image ripped straight from the a romance cover cliché.

Fennell is telling us that Catherine and Heathcliff yearn for each other, rather than showing it, falling short of that most basic of storytelling edicts. The film leans heavily into viewers’ knowledge of the novel, previous adaptations, and the marketing of this one, to “sell” sidelong glances and wet fingers as true romance. Screaming and crying and moaning further evoke the depth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s feelings, as a heartbroken, spurned Catherine takes to her bed, wasting away until she bleeds out in a scene that lifelessly recalls Lucy’s (Sadie Frost) vampiric transformation in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Heathcliff arrives to his dead love too late and makes out with her corpse. It’s all meant to be very romantic and over-the-top, but it feels so forced, so devoid of real tension or investment, that Heathcliff could have charged toward Catherine’s deathbed with a bomb strapped to his chest, finger on the detonator, mouth open for one final kiss, and I’d still be checking my watch. The characters close the movie feeling as listless and underdeveloped as they began.

Here, too, is where Fennell has missed the mark of romance, and where Heated Rivalry and Femme dazzle and draw us in with not only real yearning but also real transformation. In Heated Rivalry, something as simple as an unsent text message shows us what the character wants and the obstacle keeping him from it. When Ilya tells Shane, in Russian on the streets of Moscow, “I only want you. I’ve only ever wanted you,” we feel the depth of his longing, and his desperation to be able to say it aloud, especially in his home country, where those words carry a sense of very real threat. When Shane, tears welling in his eyes, tells Ilya not to marry Svetlana (Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova) for US citizenship, we hear how deeply Shane wants this man all to himself, forever.

A similar pas de deux between the spoken and the unspoken electrifies the exchanges between Jules and Preston in Femme. When Preston catches Jules recording them having sex, he explodes, tossing the phone into a grassy underpass. After he recovers his composure and retrieves the phone, Preston admits that he struggles with “anger” and offers to get Jules the newer, better version of the phone. Immediately afterward, Jules and Preston kiss and have tender missionary sex for the first time. In this economic storytelling, we see not only Preston’s depth of feeling but also his sudden consciousness of that feeling, a world-reordering thing that signals his transformation from gay basher to gay lover. Later at a club, when Jules flips their usual script and starts furtively stroking Preston under the table, Preston’s darting, watering eyes speak at once to the extreme desire and sense of threat he feels in the moment.

These moments are not just about the yearning; they’re also about the transformation we want from romance. Like Ilya and Shane, although in very different ways, Jules and Preston are changed by their growing love for one another, a love the audience watches unfold through sex, dialogue, physical gestures, and furtive glances. They become different people—even if it all falls apart dramatically in the end—realizing romance’s promise, to paraphrase the late Lauren Berlant’s account of the love plot’s ideology, to fix our broken lives and selves and give us better ones. We want the reparative hope of falling in love with someone who can take us apart and remake us anew. It’s that struggle and transformation in the quest for love that powers our return to romance, as the legions of Heated Rivalry rewatchers (or “reheaters”) can attest.

Do Catherine and Heathcliff change across Fennell’s Wuthering Heights? They may have regrets, but they’re still pretty much the same vengeful, petty people at the end of the movie that they were at the midpoint. Not much to rewatch for, and for the record, I don’t know anyone who’s going back to see Wuthering Heights again. To be fair, the source material has a similar problem, deferring redemption and transformation to the next generation, among whom the tensions between Cathy and Heathcliff are revisited and, ultimately, healed. (That back half of Wuthering Heights is never covered by its film adaptations, including Fennell’s.)

Maybe Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was, like its protagonists, doomed from the start. If nothing else, watching it has made me wonder why our culture is so invested in this gothic tale as a paragon of romantic longing. Brontë’s novel is about two people whose love, cankered by misunderstanding, narcissism, and a soupçon of undiagnosed mental illness, devolves into a rage that destroys them and their estates; the traditional love plot it is not. Fennell is not particularly interested in exploring that material, but she also doesn’t have enough grasp of the power and promise of romance to produce the film it seems she wanted to make. She missed the essence of Charli XCX’s repetitive call to “fall in love again and again” in “Everything is romantic,” the track used to mesmerizing, vibes-enhancing effect in the film’s early trailer.

She missed the romance, missed why, with the right book or film, we crave letting ourselves fall in love over and over and over.