Spoilers ahead for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.”Considering the film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights before it, to call Emerald Fennell’s version an extreme departure says a lot. The Saltburn director’s title for the contemporary adaptation is stylized with quotation marks (yes, it’s “Wuthering Heights,” not Wuthering Heights), and as it turns out, that punctuation does a lot of heavy lifting. What Fennell has given us is wholly original — and, in turn, delivers a different delirious understanding of a story we think we know. Indeed, the key phrase here is “think we know,” but that’s far from Fennell’s fault.
Consider director William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights, a classic adaptation that also put a lot of effort into erasing Brontë’s basic plot points. Need proof? Here’s some: It lopped off an entire third of the book, leaving generations of non-readers to believe that Wuthering Heights’ doomed, iconoclastic lovers, Heathcliff and Cathy, are the narrative’s only focus.
More liberties have been taken in the decades since. Ensuing adaptations have conflated characters, booted others, and shaped what remained into a Brontëan multiverse: Catherines that are renamed Cathy and rendered more selfish or aloof or pitiful, Heathcliffs that range from empathetic to monstrous, all of them lined up ad infinitum. In “Wuthering Heights,” Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) are at their most untamed, animalistic extremes.
‘Wuthering Heights’ Final Flashback & Cathy’s Smile, Explained
Keeping in mind what a radical departure Fennell’s take on “Wuthering Heights” is, the fact that it manages to wedge in a twist ending is truly a credit to its director. Rather than taking the more traditional route of adaptations before it (namely, leaning into the metaphor of Cathy haunting Heathcliff after her death by turning her into a literal ghost, followed by Heathcliff dying and doing the same), “Wuthering Heights” instead hurls the viewer back into the past, and the couple’s childhood origin story. To understand the ending, we need to understand the beginning.
The first chunk of “Wuthering Heights” devotes itself to establishing the dynamic between Cathy and Heathcliff, who grow up in an environment in which ideas of goodness are completely inverted; to receive praise, one must prove one’s nastiness rather than one’s grace, grabbing and snatching and smacking whatever is in their wake.
In one brutally indelible scene, Cathy’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, becomes enraged after both children are late for his birthday dinner, having been caught for hours in a storm. After they find their way back to Wuthering Heights, Cathy’s father rolls himself into frothing, dangerous anger aimed at his daughter. But before Mr. Earnshaw makes his first move to inevitably strike his daughter, Heathcliff takes the blame for their delay. Enraged, Mr. Earnshaw screams, “I am the kindest man alive!” — an allusion to taking Heathcliff in as a ward — before beating the child nearly to death. The act literally and irreparably scars young Heathcliff’s body and psyche, teaching all who witness this moment that love and pain are indistinguishable.
Though the scene is important, it’s not something we expect to revisit. And yet, we do, through the long trek of the narrative that turns out, for Cathy, to be a form of slow suicide, punctuated by sex and denial and death. After all that, we find ourselves back in time, with Heathcliff on the night of Mr. Earnshaw’s birthday.
Wounded and bleeding, he chastely crawls into Cathy’s bed, the girl who calls him her pet. After they innocently settle in for the night, a shattered Heathcliff softly confesses love and eternal allegiance to an apparently sleeping Cathy. But as Heathcliff closes his eyes, we see Cathy smile, lingering before the screen goes black. She’s heard him.
So what does young Catherine’s smile represent? Is it meant to express a subtle thrill of knowing, or to upend the idea of romance completely — that every choice and action the viewer has seen leading up to these final seconds has been a game of possession and obsession, and nothing more? Knowing Fennell, it’s likely not that simple.
Love Is Nasty, Brutish, and Short in ‘Wuthering Heights’
Even if we interpret Cathy’s smile to mean she always knew of Heathcliff’s obsession (or love) and fealty, can romance really be upended in a universe where carnality is constantly at the forefront? Instead of brooding romance and fog-heavy moors, the land at times looks parched, and the fog resembles hellish smoke. Cathy’s first introduction to sex is voyeuristic, when she spies two servants engaging in BDSM with bridles and hanging leather reins.
To steal from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Fennell’s approach to “Wuthering Heights” appears to be that love, or whatever passes for love, is “nasty, brutish, and short.” For all the talk of how Fennell turns the story’s sexual subtext into main text, in so many words, what USA Today deemed a “smutification” of the subject matter — the movie itself is an anti-romance fit for anti-heroes.
By the time we see a montage of Heathcliff and Cathy consummating their love (or obsession) more than halfway through the movie, it’s conventional to the point of being Brechtian (but not in the way MovieWeb’s own Corey Atad implied in his middling-to-positive review). At this point, Fennell’s visions of sludge and bile and blood, along with the constant, thrumming potentiality of violence, desensitize anything that could be taken as erotic through a mainstream lens, at least for the viewer, that is.
How ‘Wuthering Heights’ 2026’s Ending (and Plot) Differs From Its Source Material
In the 2026 rendition, secondary characters are also given extreme inner makeovers. Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton, is stripped of an inchoate cruelty and given softer edges. Mr. Earnshaw’s depravity and drinking jaundice his skin and his soul, replacing Cathy’s brother, who is killed off before the movie begins (and chillingly also named Heathcliff instead of Hindley) as an antagonist. Nelly, another Earnshaw ward, is both a confidant and an object of derision for Cathy, but one with agency who loves and loathes her only friend; Nelly’s attempts to keep Heathcliff and Cathy apart would be villainous in any other movie, if it weren’t for the fact that in this one, everyone is a type of villain.
Nothing proves that last point more than the ending for “Wuthering Heights,” one completely untethered to anything Brontë could have dreamed up. And to undo everything the viewer thinks they know, all it takes is a simple smile. Rather than ending with Catherine’s death and a miscarriage, the book version sees her give birth just as she passes, and their daughter, Cathy, becomes a character for the final set of chapters.
The Real Meaning of Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’
Released in the midst of a socio-political climate in which many have argued that cruelty is the point, it’s no surprise that Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” embodies the same ethos. But that doesn’t necessarily stand at odds with the thesis of the film, in Fennell’s own words. As she stated in an exclusive February 2026 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the film “begins where it ends and ends where it begins,” for a reason.
“And that’s the thing about love, and it’s the thing about the book, right? It’s that it’s forever and it’s cyclical, and so there’s no stop — even when there’s a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it’s not really a stop […] it’s about the depths of human feeling and how it exists in a profound way, not just a physical one […] that felt like the right way to end it for me.”
Yes, this can be true: Love can be found in what is terrible and toxic, buried beneath ruins and rubble. But that doesn’t mean that it’s good for us. As “Wuthering Heights” reminds us, abuse, obsession, and possession can feel a lot like love when it’s all you’ve ever known.
What do you think? Did we miss the mark, or do you think we got it right? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
- Release Date
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February 13, 2026
- Runtime
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136 Minutes
- Director
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Emerald Fennell
- Writers
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Emerald Fennell, Emily Brontë
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