135 min | R | February 13, 2026 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Emerald Fennell adapts Emily Brontë with raw carnality and visual opulence. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi destroy each other across the Yorkshire moors. This is not your grandmother’s period drama.
Period adaptations of classic literature usually prioritize fidelity and restraint. Fennell throws out that playbook. Wuthering Heights is a story about obsessive, destructive love that ruins everyone it touches. Fennell leans into the violence and sexuality Brontë could only suggest. Heathcliff and Catherine are not tragic romantics. They are two people who want each other with an intensity that curdles into mutual destruction. The film refuses to soften or sentimentalize their relationship.
Margot Robbie plays Catherine with feral energy barely contained by period costume and social expectation. She is a woman who knows what she wants and chooses security over passion and spends her life regretting it. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff with volcanic rage masked by cold calculation. He is a man who was denied everything and will burn the world to punish those who denied him. Robbie and Elordi create chemistry that is uncomfortable and magnetic. The supporting cast, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, all serve the central destructive relationship.
Fennell directed Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. She knows how to use beauty to frame ugliness and make audiences complicit. The Yorkshire moors are shot by Linus Sandgren with painterly precision. Every frame is composed for maximum visual impact. The production design creates a world of suffocating propriety that barely contains the passion beneath. The film is explicitly sexual in ways period dramas usually avoid. The violence when it arrives is shocking.
This is Wuthering Heights as gothic horror rather than romantic tragedy. Fennell makes a film about love as disease and obsession as damnation. The adaptation is loose but the spirit is faithful. This is what the novel always was beneath the period trappings.