Wuthering Heights (2026) - A Pointless Mess.

 Wuthering Heights (2026)

"Wuthering Heights", from the very first trailer it looked like an epochal cringefest, and when I then remembered the director was Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) my expectations sank even further.

However I decided to give myself this Valentine’s Day gift and went to see it with Daria.

The premises online were also of a half-pornographic film that only partially winked at "Wuthering Heights" (book), something that from the start didn’t particularly bother me since I’m very in favor of artistic digressions from the source material. The real problem that emerged after seeing it is another. 

The huge flaw, with a capital F, of this “Wuthering Heights” (2026) is its lack of courage.

It’s a film of disarming cowardice, that neither dares to be as scabrous or provocative as "Saltburn" (or the premise everyone talked about EVERYWHERE online) nor close to the original work. Neither meat nor fish, to put it simply. 

An hybrid dragged for its entire duration (barely) by the two leads until a somewhat emotional ending, but devoid of real and felt pathos. But not in a way you can just overlook. No. EVERY single glimmer of pathos is completely missing from this film, from the first minute to the last.

The screenplay is also unbearable, plainly badly written, to the point that at times I genuinely thought the dialogues had been written by ChatGPT, just as unbearable are the characters’ motivations, their drives and their development, both psychological and historical.

We know next to nothing about Heathcliff and we know just as little about the protagonist of the story Catherine. Apart from a very banal background where we discover her father is a violent alcoholic (how original) we are told nothing else about her, and for most of the film, if not its entirety, we don’t see her change for even half a second. So annoying. 

Characters that don’t evolve equal characters written like shit and useless.

The inconsistent screenplay of this film is unfortunately not the worst aspect. 

The sets are beautiful, but they look like they came out of a post-apocalyptic dadaist exhibition, where Modern elements and Victorian ones are combined (once again very dissonant with each other). This “pretentious” mixed use of props extends to the costumes as well. Gorgeous for most of the film if it weren’t for the fusion of excellent silk dresses (the wedding one is insane) with others made of plastic, which thankfully appear only here and there throughout the viewing (completely out of nowhere). I’m not a purist of historical periods, but seeing fucking plastic in a film set in 1770 definitely makes you raise an eyebrow.

Fennell’s “superb” direction is among the worst aspects of this work. 

You can clearly see she was extremely proud behind the camera, too bad the film starts well, with a pressing rhythm that isn’t boring at all, and ends with the next two acts in a spiral of nothingness.

There’s no rhythm, no life, no pathos and above all no coherent vision of what this was supposed to be. Either you go full weird, like with Saltburn (which remains the most tolerable of her filmography), or you do something more structured and suited to the source material. It would have been better than this…this unbearable “Frankenstein” narrative (just to stay on Romantic writers) wrapped in a cellophane of fake pornographic theatricality.

Some scenes are even well directed, but holy hell they look like music videos or Gucci ads rather than scenes of a film cohesive with each other or in any way serving a linear narrative. Whatever, let’s move on.

The actors did their job. I much preferred Jacob Elordi to Margot Robbie, both for character construction and overall performance. Margot still felt too stuck in the marionette vibes of Barbie. 

Among the various badly written and even worse characterized characters it’s impossible not to mention the insufferable Nelly, played by Hong Chau, who rightfully enters the ranks of the most disastrous and worst written characters of recent years.

Her presence, everything she does, comes from a nonexistent conflict and a characterization so thin that you don’t understand for what reason in the world she does what she does. Why?

No idea, truly depressing.

I’m not done yet. Because among the worst of the worst of this pretentious, pompous and fake film are the original scores by Charli XCX. Music so disconnected from everything shown on screen and so out of place that every single time it kicked in, to the viewer’s misfortune, I cringed…I cringed hard, because no matter how good she might be (debatable), here it doesn’t fit for shit. Absolute zero. It was put in only to further emphasize this fake low-budget Victorian punk vibe.

Now, I read online that this film is the worst thing to happen to Emily Brontë after pneumonia. That’s not for me to say, but “Wuthering Heights” comfortably slips among the most insignificant films recent cinema has produced. A film where appearance deceives, and substance is nothing. At least I saw it at the cinema with Daria…and Irene…and Erika…and that’s already more than enough, and at least the Wuthering Heights were really...Wuthering, they were consistent on that.