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Ep. 8 | Wuthering Heights — When a Director Mistakes Desire for Depth
Emerald Fennell wanted to recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading Wuthering Heights for the first time. That is the stated intention. It is also, perhaps, the most honest description of what the film actually achieves and where it ultimately falls short.
This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on the most divisive film of early 2026. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Charli xcx on the soundtrack. Anachronistic costumes that belong at the Met Gala. A film that is simultaneously gorgeous, provocative, frequently entertaining and surprisingly hollow. A film that knows exactly what it wants to look like but is not always sure what it wants to say.
Let us start with what nobody is disputing. Wuthering Heights is visually extraordinary. Linus Sandgren's cinematography makes the Yorkshire moors feel simultaneously historical and completely contemporary, saturated with a color palette that owes more to fashion photography than to period drama. The production design is outrageous in the best sense. Jacqueline Durran's costumes exist in a space between 18th century England and something you might see on a runway in Paris today. Fennell is one of the most confident visual stylists working in mainstream cinema, and every frame of this film announces that confidence without apology.
Robbie is doing real work here. Her Catherine is restless, sensual, furious, and occasionally terrifying, a woman who understands exactly the cage she has been born into and cannot decide whether to escape it or set it on fire. It is a performance that strips away every trace of the warmth and accessibility that made Barbie a cultural event, and replaces it with something rawer and considerably more dangerous. Whether the film is worthy of that performance is the question we keep returning to.
Elordi as Heathcliff is more complicated. Physically, he is exactly what the role requires: imposing, brooding, and possessed of an intensity that reads across the moors as easily as it reads across a close-up. But Heathcliff is one of the most psychologically complex characters in English literature. He is not merely a romantic lead. He is a man shaped by class violence, racial othering, and a specific kind of love that has curdled into something indistinguishable from hatred. The novel gives him an interior life of almost unbearable depth. Fennell's film gives him a series of extraordinary entrances and very little underneath them.
This is the central problem. Brontë's Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any conventional sense. It is a novel about what obsession does to people, about class and race and the specific cruelty of a society that decides who counts and who does not, about love as a force that destroys rather than redeems. The novel does not want you to find Heathcliff romantic. It wants you to find him terrifying and to understand exactly why he became that way. Fennell's version wants you to find him devastating and beautiful, which is a fundamentally different project. One that the source material was never written to support.
The anachronisms are the most revealing choice. Charli xcx on the soundtrack, Met Gala gowns in the Yorkshire countryside, a red acrylic floor in the Linton house. Fennell has spoken about these choices as a way of arguing that the love story transcends its period setting, that Catherine and Heathcliff are so eternal they cannot be contained by the 18th century. It is a defensible idea. The problem is that the period setting is not merely backdrop in Brontë.
We came for Brontë and found Fennell. That is not the worst thing to find. It is just not the same thing.
Follow us on:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward
Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/4TjKf
Substack: https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward
X: https://x.com/4thwallinward
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By 4th Wall InwardEmerald Fennell wanted to recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading Wuthering Heights for the first time. That is the stated intention. It is also, perhaps, the most honest description of what the film actually achieves and where it ultimately falls short.
This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on the most divisive film of early 2026. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Charli xcx on the soundtrack. Anachronistic costumes that belong at the Met Gala. A film that is simultaneously gorgeous, provocative, frequently entertaining and surprisingly hollow. A film that knows exactly what it wants to look like but is not always sure what it wants to say.
Let us start with what nobody is disputing. Wuthering Heights is visually extraordinary. Linus Sandgren's cinematography makes the Yorkshire moors feel simultaneously historical and completely contemporary, saturated with a color palette that owes more to fashion photography than to period drama. The production design is outrageous in the best sense. Jacqueline Durran's costumes exist in a space between 18th century England and something you might see on a runway in Paris today. Fennell is one of the most confident visual stylists working in mainstream cinema, and every frame of this film announces that confidence without apology.
Robbie is doing real work here. Her Catherine is restless, sensual, furious, and occasionally terrifying, a woman who understands exactly the cage she has been born into and cannot decide whether to escape it or set it on fire. It is a performance that strips away every trace of the warmth and accessibility that made Barbie a cultural event, and replaces it with something rawer and considerably more dangerous. Whether the film is worthy of that performance is the question we keep returning to.
Elordi as Heathcliff is more complicated. Physically, he is exactly what the role requires: imposing, brooding, and possessed of an intensity that reads across the moors as easily as it reads across a close-up. But Heathcliff is one of the most psychologically complex characters in English literature. He is not merely a romantic lead. He is a man shaped by class violence, racial othering, and a specific kind of love that has curdled into something indistinguishable from hatred. The novel gives him an interior life of almost unbearable depth. Fennell's film gives him a series of extraordinary entrances and very little underneath them.
This is the central problem. Brontë's Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any conventional sense. It is a novel about what obsession does to people, about class and race and the specific cruelty of a society that decides who counts and who does not, about love as a force that destroys rather than redeems. The novel does not want you to find Heathcliff romantic. It wants you to find him terrifying and to understand exactly why he became that way. Fennell's version wants you to find him devastating and beautiful, which is a fundamentally different project. One that the source material was never written to support.
The anachronisms are the most revealing choice. Charli xcx on the soundtrack, Met Gala gowns in the Yorkshire countryside, a red acrylic floor in the Linton house. Fennell has spoken about these choices as a way of arguing that the love story transcends its period setting, that Catherine and Heathcliff are so eternal they cannot be contained by the 18th century. It is a defensible idea. The problem is that the period setting is not merely backdrop in Brontë.
We came for Brontë and found Fennell. That is not the worst thing to find. It is just not the same thing.
Follow us on:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward
Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/4TjKf
Substack: https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward
X: https://x.com/4thwallinward