Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight

Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.

As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.

The Bradford Pennine Gateway Trail, launching this weekend, aims to ‘change perceptions of Bradford’ by taking in the moors and the area’s new national nature reserve

A grainy photograph, dated 1938, hangs in a frame on the downstairs wall of my B&B. It shows 100, perhaps 200, elegantly attired trippers sitting on the green at Shipley Glen in West Yorkshire. They’re picnicking, chatting, taking the air and enjoying the sunshine, while admiring the rocks and woods that frame the deep gully below. It’s local, low-carbon, cheap-as-chips tourism before the jet age – and also a model for how we may travel in the future.

I arrived here thanks to a new trail, launching on 19 September, that runs through the also newly established Bradford Pennine Gateway national nature reserve – astonishingly, the first reserve of this kind to be created in West Yorkshire. The trail uses almost the same name and is a savvy bit of sustainable planning, connecting the three towns of Ilkley, Saltaire and Haworth but, by appealing to walkers, hopefully inspiring people to explore beyond the confines of these honeypots.

The universal themes addressed by one of humanity’s greatest storytellers more than merit Hollywood box-office treatment

The Magasphere’s endless appetite for culture wars is wearily familiar. But who could have foreseen that Greek literature would become the new casus belli? Ahead of its much-anticipated general release next week, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has triggered Elon Musk and other supposed defenders of western civilisation. Directorial decisions such as the casting of the Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, Mr Musk ranted incoherently, amounted to “pissing on Homer’s grave”.

The absurd insistence on the white skin of a mythological figure reveals nothing we didn’t already know about the owner of X. The rest of us can move on and look forward to a lavish cinematic take on a story that has inspired artists for almost 3,000 years. Homer’s account of Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home from the Trojan wars has been reworked by Virgil in the Aeneid, relocated to Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and given a feminist treatment by Margaret Atwood in her Penelopiad. Now for the 21st-century Hollywood treatment.

Tactile details and a no-nonsense approach make this biography a refreshing change from more lurid fare

Both Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.

For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf.

As Emerald Fennell’s film sparks debate, we celebrate the pioneering brilliance of the siblings’ work

This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a male narrator, William Crimsworth, it offers a downbeat story of everyday middle-class striving as the protagonist travels to Brussels to establish his career as a teacher. But the last publisher to see it thought it showed promise, despite being too short and insufficiently “striking and exciting”. Had the author anything else to offer? Luckily, Jane Eyre – which amply supplied the earlier book’s deficiencies – was already in train and was soon accepted with alacrity. Although The Professor remained unpublished in Charlotte’s lifetime, she continued to believe that it was “as good as I can write”; its subtly ironised male voice reveals her underlying literary sophistication.

By portraying the young woman Heathcliff abuses as a sexily willing participant in her own degradation, Fennell’s adaptation betrays the book, and her audience

Tragedy is the beating heart of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; it’s a gothic novel that takes place in a society built on hierarchy and oppression, and exposes the fragility of love and how easily it is distorted into dangerous obsession. Unsurprisingly, there is no happy ending.

Although every character in the novel is stalked by tragedy, few suffer as much as Isabella Linton. Unaware of Heathcliff’s vindictive motives, she becomes trapped in an intensely abusive marriage, one she is only freed from by fleeing to London. While she is undoubtedly a victim, in the end the character also has agency; Isabella is able to escape her abuser, though not without considerable scars. It’s a pivotal moment for her character, and one that she’s been stripped of in Emerald Fennell’s quote-unquote “adaptation”.

Reaction to Emerald Fennell’s movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi

My group of six English teachers – aged from 30 to 54 – saw the film on Friday. We are still processing our thoughts in a group chat. We agreed that the visuals were often delightfully shocking. We talked about the contrasts between the lavish costumes and the moor landscape, which we thought Fennell got right. We talked about the Charli xcx music and how well it evoked the landscape and the spirit of the book.

By turning the novel into just a corset-heaving love story, the director has stripped it of what made it so boundary-pushing

It’s difficult, when watching Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”, not to imagine what Emily Brontë would have made of it. Before I get into it, I feel obliged to state that although I love the book I am not a purist. I often relish creative reinterpretations of classics. Admittedly, this one came with a fair few red flags, from the casting of Margot Robbie (simply too old, Cathy is a teenager) and Jacob Elordi (simply too white, Heathcliff, while his origins are uncertain, is described as darker skinned) to the unhinged marketing and crass brand tie-ins.

Nevertheless, I was still excited to see it. So why did I leave the cinema not only bored, but feeling a little bit sad? Fennell said she wanted to make the film she imagined at 14, the age at which many of us read the novel in English class. Fennell focuses almost entirely on the “love story” at the expense of almost all of the novel’s other themes. Of course, if you’re a teenager in love, the doomed connection between Cathy and Heathcliff does captivate, although as an abuser who hangs a dog, Heathcliff is not exactly fanciable. I do understand the impulse behind Fennell’s fan-fictiony desire to have them consummate their love, when Brontë, who probably never touched a man her entire life, left all that desire unrealised. Horniness at the expense of all else, however, can feel terribly hollow.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

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Packed cinemas testify to the allure of Emily Brontë’s tale, even if this latest retelling is not to everyone’s taste

It’s hard to think of any book with a stronger hold on its admirers than Wuthering Heights. Almost 200 years after publication, Emily Brontë’s tale of forbidden love and ruthless revenge inspires a devotion that makes any reinterpretation feel like a personal and proprietary affront.

Into this sea of sensitivities has plunged the director Emerald Fennell, whose new adaptation has become one of the year’s most debated films. Dubbed “50 shades of Brontë”, everything about it has been scrutinised: from the casting of Aussies Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff to the anachronistic costumes and music, and the overt sexualisation of the plot.

The maximalist adaptation of the gothic romance shows great interest in production design but very little in character

It does not take long into Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s English lit classic, for one to detect the film-maker’s true faith. It is not to the challenging and beloved gothic novel of emotional repression and inheritance; as with many other cinematic adaptations, Fennell dispenses with the unruly latter half of the book, along with most of its conventions. In Fennell’s emphatically maximalist vision – she has explained that the quotation marks in the film’s marketing are a note of humility, to her singular and limited interpretation – the tortuously connected Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) swoon about the Yorkshire moors in extravagant, anachronistic formalwear, flagrantly unbound by period decorum.

Over three features, the English writer-director has demonstrated a penchant for sticky visuals; arguably the most-discussed scene from 2023’s Saltburn, her discourse-driving sophomore feature, involved the licking of cummy bathwater from the drain. Wuthering Heights is not to be controversially out-soaked. In closeup, sweat beads and drips down a spine; snail slime indolently streaks a window; freshly poured pig blood mucks Cathy’s dress. Desire, less suggested than enforced, stains everything. Early in the film, just after the abrupt ageing of Cathy and Heathcliff from boundless children (played by Charlotte Mellington and Adolescence’s Owen Cooper) to unspecific adults, Elordi’s brooding, beastly Heathcliff catches Robbie’s blonde Cathy, furiously horny after a bit of light voyeurism, pleasuring herself against the windswept rocks. She tries to hide her hand in her dress; he picks her up by the bodice strings, and licks her fingers clean.

In Emerald Fennell’s BDSM-tinged film, critics have praised Clunes’s turn as the ‘devout misogynist’ Mr Earnshaw

It has been billed as the sexiest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with bodices ripped to shreds and a flirtation with BDSM. And yet the standout star of Emerald Fennell’s new film isn’t one of its smouldering young lovers, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, but British television’s most affable grump – Martin Clunes.

Clunes plays Mr Earnshaw, the patriarch of the Earnshaw household whose decision to bring home a destitute young Heathcliff from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Moors sets in motion the destructive love story at the centre of Wuthering Heights. In Fennell’s reworking, Cathy’s elder brother, Hindley, is abolished entirely, with his cruelty, boozing and gambling folded into the father instead.

Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë is an emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire that misuses Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi but makes the most of Martin Clunes

Emerald Fennell cranks up the campery as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on the windswept Yorkshire moor as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM. Margot Robbie’s Cathy at one stage secretly heads off to the moor for a hilarious bit of self-pleasuring – although, sadly, there are no audaciously intercut scenes of thirst-trap Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, simultaneously doing the same thing in the stable, while muttering gruffly in that Yerrrrrkshire accent of his.

This then is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or rather “Wuthering Heights”; the title archly appears in inverted commas, although the postmodern irony seems pointless. Cathy is a primped belle quivering in the presence of Heathcliff, who himself is a moody, long-haired, bearded outsider, as if Scarlett O’Hara were going to melt into the arms of Charles Manson. However, he does get substantially Darcyfied up later on, rocking a shorter and more winsome hairstyle, his gossamer-thin shirt never dry.

Emerald Fennell’s lust-fuelled take on Emily Brontë’s novel has cued a hot flush of merchandise ranging from themed snacks to thongs. What exactly are they buying into?

That appetite for Emerald Fennell’s bodice-ripping adaptation of Emily Brontë’s yarn of doomed romance is high is not in doubt. Whether it’s high enough to sustain sales for an official Wuthering Heights açai bowl seems less certain.

Yet this is exactly what is on offer in food aisles across the US, with two bespoke bowls churned up for hungry film fans with the explanatory slogan: “This is what happens when you turn yearning into flavour.”

As Emerald Fennell’s adaptation hits cinemas, a slew of visitors are expected at the sites that inspired Emily Brontë’s novel. People living close by, however, are taking it in their stride

The four-mile trail from the village of Haworth to Top Withens in West Yorkshire is well trodden; numerous footprints squelched into the boggy ground by those seeking the view said to have inspired the setting for Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. The landscape rolls in desolate waves of brown bracken. A lone tree punctuates the scene. It’s bleakly, hauntingly beautiful.

With the release of Emerald Fennell’s new film of the Gothic masterpiece starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi next week, Haworth and many of the filming locations in the Yorkshire Dales national park, where the book is set, are braced for a slew of visitors.

As Emerald Fennell’s provocative adaptation hits screens, this narration from the White Lotus actor reminds us of the brilliance of Brontë’s tempestuous novel

Rare is the Wuthering Heights adaptation that fails to ruffle the feathers of the Brontë faithful. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film was criticised for its grit and gloom while Emerald Fennell’s new version, which arrives in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, was described as “aggressively provocative” after test screenings. Perhaps now is the time to return to the source material. In the audioverse, there have already been readings by Michael Kitchener, Daniel Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Patricia Routledge and Joanne Froggatt, though I favour this 2020 edition narrated by Aimee Lou Wood, of Sex Education and The White Lotus fame.

Set in Yorkshire, Emily Brontë’s tempestuous novel opens with Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, visiting his sullen landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote farmhouse where he gets snowed in. Bedding down for the night, he stumbles upon the diaries of the late Catherine Earnshaw, who writes of her love for Heathcliff, an orphan brought by her father to live with the family. Later Mr Lockwood has a nightmare in which the ghost of Catherine begs to be let in through the window (a scene immortalised in song by Kate Bush). The following day he returns to Thrushcross Grange where he asks the housekeeper, Nellie, to tell him about the Earnshaws. Nellie shares a dark tale of abuse, revenge and doomed love.

Speaking in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London, the director of the much-anticipated Brontë adaptation also revealed that Margot Robbie asked to play Cathy

Emerald Fennell has revealed that Margot Robbie asked if she could play the lead role in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights before she had approached the actor to do so.

Robbie, whose production company LuckyChap Entertainment produced the film, asked if she could play Cathy after reading the script. “I sent it to them to produce, and Margot luckily asked if she might play Cathy,” said Fennell in conversation at the BFI Southbank in London.

The acclaimed latest version of the Emily Brontë bestseller is, however, not without controversies over race and age

Reviews might be embargoed until next Monday, but Los Angeles social media is getting hot under the collar after an early screening of Emerald Fennell’s highly anticipated adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

“Intoxicating, transcendent, tantalising, bewitching, lust worthy, hypnotic,” wrote Courtney Howard, adding that the film “expertly captures the breathtaking ache and essence of desire” and “is a god-tier new classic”.

The new film adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell looks set to be provocative – but nowhere near as shocking as Emily Brontë’s original

The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.

The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.

As Wuthering Heights gets a raunchy Hollywood remake, our writer takes a pilgrimage through Haworth, the village where its author lived – and finds her spirit still electrifying the cobbled streets and windswept moors

It’s a crisp afternoon in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and I’m drinking a pint of Emily Brontë beer in The Kings Arms. Other Brontës are on tap – Anne is a traditional ale, Charlotte an IPA, Branwell a porter – but the barman says Emily, an amber ale with a “malty biscuit flavour”, is the most popular. It’s the obvious choice today, anyway: in a few hours, Oscar-winning film-maker Emerald Fennell will be at the Brontë women’s writing festival in a church just up the road, discussing her adaptation of Emily’s 19th-century gothic masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

The film, to be released just before Valentine’s Day next year, is already scandal-ridden. It all started with Fennell’s casting of Hollywood stars Jacob Elordi and Margot (“Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Barbie”) Robbie causing uproar. An erotic teaser trailer full of tight bodices, cracking whips and sweaty bodies had the same effect. But heads were really sent spinning by reports of a scene with a public hanging and a nun who “fondles the corpse’s visible erection”.

Robbie addresses backlash to casting Elordi as a character described by Brontë as ‘dark-skinned’, while Fennell praises her female star’s ‘big dick energy’

Margot Robbie has come out in defence of Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which she is playing Cathy opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff.

Despite being months away from release, the film has attracted criticism for its casting as well as alterations that Fennell has made to the characters. In an interview with Vogue magazine, Robbie said: “I get it … there’s nothing else to go off at this point until people see the movie.”