Ever since Writer/Director Emerald Fennell’s Best Original Screenplay win for Promising Young Woman starring Carey Mulligan in let’s say the revenge-date epic, Fennell has been a puzzle to some… meaning men. This is said in a nice way, because her recent release Wuthering Heights, “sort of a sister, not a twin,” to the classic Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights” she says, is a bell-ringer for women. Not just because Jacob Elordi is sexy AF, but because this movie speaks directly to us, is us.
Take a look at the official trailer from Warner Bros.
Fronted by Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw with Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, these fated lovers aren’t anywhere near the Victorian-era repressed characters as drawn by Brontë. Add a spectacular bonus performance by Alison Oliver as Isabella Linton, with her “room only for my ribbons.” Isabella plumbs the depth of male dominance that is eye-averting.
In Brontë’s only novel published under male pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily herself drove a dagger into romantic conventions at the time. Just a year later, in 1848, she died of tuberculosis. Victorian women instinctively got her novel then, and men decried it as soon as they knew it was written by a woman – the “fairer sex” for whom passionate lack of carnal self-control was thought impossible. It is therefore likely that women instinctively get Fennell’s Wuthering Heights now too, whereas men – particularly male critics and reviewers – may not?
Before we jump off the gender-gap cliff, let’s take a look at the career and sensibility of arguably genius Filmmaker Emerald Fennell. The Director turns 41 this year in October, and claims freakish cult hit Saltburn among her three full-blown features, the newest, Wuthering Heights for Warner Bros. But she also has an interesting TV pedigree.
Not Just Film, Her Brilliant TV Career Thus Far in 2026
For the record, this Wuthering Heights director hails from London, with TV credits listed here but notably for “Killing Eve.” As a filmmaker, she is sometimes compared to Jane Campion and Mary Harron or Sophia Coppola in visuals, though she shares the bleeding edge of a Céline Sciamma, whose French film Portrait of a Woman on Fire packs a Fennell-like gut punch. Here’s a quick round-up for reference on directors she’s often likened to as an auteur.
How They Stack: Fennell, Jane Campion, Sophia Coppola, Mary Harron…
You could argue that Emerald Fennell actually skirts the line along the perimeter of a director like Peter Greenaway, with an elegant ferocity that engraves its impact as an intellectual, sexual, as well as emotional rehearsal for life. Like Greenaway, Fennell is determined to drop the bottom our of your comfort zone as a viewer. And this may be why her Wuthering Heights adaptation has performed to just breaking even on budget from Warner Bros at $80 M USD in domestically, but double that, upwards of $160 M USD, internationally. Here’s a brief Greenaway cheatsheet for a quick compare-contrast with the director.
But comparisons to other auteurs probably just muddies the water of Emerald Fennell’s magical imaginary pond. For women, the reflections of the female gaze that stare back from Wuthering Heights may be lost on male audiences. Under what circumstances would you expect to find Margot Robbie as Cathy expressing her sexual awakening by watching the cook knead bread, or by sticking her finger inside a fish mouth gelled in an aspic meant for dinner? Or pleasuring herself under oppressive Victorian skirts, raw in nature, on the North York Moors of Yorkshire ostensibly in 1847?
Fennel is the herb used in witchcraft and medicine, to both kill and cure; this is where Emerald Fennell lives in filmmaking. Promising Young Woman climaxes in an ending so brutal you wince, yet so close to the truth for women that you have to acknowledge the realism. Saltburn rips a hole in male sexuality so deep, you figure American men will recoil, while European men may be more resilient to the shock of “the bathwater scene,” as it is known among critics.
Since its release on Feb. 13th, Wuthering Heights has been viewed with excitement, disgust, suspicion, and lesser box office than could be had. Maybe in part because it is too true in its unmasking of Love. Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are bonded, as Margot Robbie intones “I am Heathcliff” from the book. This isn’t picture book romance: it’s visceral, frighteningly destructive, vengeful, even beyond bodice-ripping sex, twin madness or folie a deux.
While Emerald Fennell cracks open the spine of Emily Brontë’s novel, she brings back Brontë’s hammer-swing at cordial conventions of courtship and matrimony. Margot Robbie is so far from Barbie, you almost wince at the gloomy rain-soaked suffering, that septic spiral into regret. Jacob Elordi is almost another kind of Frankenstein, a man made by woman, with Catherine as his puppet master of body and soul. Yet this depth of Love with a capital “L” is a clawhammer that beats them both down in this Emerald Fennell version. And the scariest part? For at least women in the audience, we’ve seen this kind of love before, between duty and desire, obligation and oblivion, where destiny and desire collide like a shipwreck when that kind of love drowns out all reason, takes everything you have… leaves you adrift, for dead inside, or for better or for worse.
Watch the captivating heartwrencher Wuthering Heights from Warner Bros and Director Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, and Hong Chau, with a thrilling Alison Oliver too, click now.
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