Ever since the early release of director Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” on Feb. 12, the adaptation has been bashed with countless scathing reviews across all platforms, from Tiktok to Rotten Tomatoes.

Red flags went up for enthusiasts of novelist Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” — the source material of the movie — as soon as advertising began in November of 2025. When it was announced that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi would be starring as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, many Wuthering Heights fans immediately took issue with the piece.

In the novel, a core part of Heathcliff’s character and the racist abuse he endures is his “dark skin” and “black hair.” Characters in the novel refer to him with slurs and treat him as an outsider because of it, which clearly establishes that he is, in fact, a person of color. This is a primary barrier that exists between Catherine and Heathcliff in the novel, even stronger than class differences. Some have deduced that Heathcliff may be of Romani or South Asian descent because of these descriptions, but his exact ethnicity does not matter so much as the fact that the character is not white.

Jacob Elordi, although he did a fantastic job as Heathcliff with the content given to him, does not really fit the script for this one.

Some discourse has gone around online about Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as the starring roles for “Wuthering Heights,” with countless users describing it as feeling like watching the two most popular kids in high school doing a dramatic reading. It’s difficult to truly view it as art in this sense.

Another flag that was raised during marketing for “Wuthering Heights” was how it is being labelled as a love story, when really, the source material is a tragic tale of psychological warfare, unjust social barriers to love, and revenge.

It felt a lot like the marketing for “It Ends With Us,” a movie about generational abuse which was advertised as a fun love story to watch in your florals for a girls night out.

All of this aside, if you view the movie as an entirely separate entity from Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” the movie was tolerable and at some parts very encapsulating. The dynamics demonstrated between Catherine and Heathcliff are to some extent intriguing, but as it exists independently within the film, almost not romantic at all. This is especially disconcerting since the movie is marketed as a romance.

Even if you are to view the movie as an extremely (emphasis on extremely) loose adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” it still does not live up to what it claims to be. You go in expecting to feel the chemistry between the two main characters, but there’s not much there. Somehow, their interactions feel impersonal and void of any love, even as they repeatedly tell each other “I love you.”

Fennell explained in an interview with the Guardian that this adaptation of Wuthering Heights is largely based on her adolescent experience of the novel, amplifying it under a “sex-charged” lens. This is painfully apparent in the nature of Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship as portrayed in the “Wuthering Heights” movie.

A majority of the movie emphasizes what Fennell describes as the “sado-masochistic” essence of “Wuthering Heights.” This concept could’ve been interesting to explore if it wasn’t done in such a one-dimensional manner — especially for what is supposed to be a romance movie.

No matter which way you slice it, this facet of the movie was not done well, even though it could have been powerful and authentically a gothic romance.

As a “Wuthering Heights” adaptation, the movie feels like a literary mockery. It seems like Fennell directed the movie with Catherine as a self-insert of her 14-year-old self (which to some extent, she admitted to being the truth). It feels shallow, somehow dodging and emitting some of the most crucial parts of the novel. Effectively, Fennell has stripped Wuthering Heights of its true meaning, stripping it down to a “romantic” story. Again, Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is not a romance.

As a romance movie which is merely inspired by “Wuthering Heights,” it is hardly romantic at all. “Wuthering Heights” is clearly made so the audience is to focus on how attractive Margo Robbie and Jacob Elordi are and how well they look together, rather than any real chemistry. The societal and familial reasons why Catherine and Heathcliff cannot be together are hardly touched on, making their painful separation feel pointless. Many of the scenes where Catherine and Heathcliff are together feels the same as the 30-second bridges of a four minute song clearly only meant for Tiktok edits. As a romantic relationship in the movie alone, Catherine and Heathcliff’s lacks depth.

Art is made to be interpreted and remade through generations. This movie was allowed to not be an exact retelling of the source material, however so many things were altered and twisted that it’s almost as if this a completely different story with different characters.

This is not to say the movie was not entertaining. The movie’s strongest asset was its beautiful cinematography — from the gloomy shots of the moors to the despair of Wuthering Heights itself. The visual storytelling was beautiful and fitting. Each frame was like a painting to look upon.

The problem comes with the delusive methods of marketing and the implications of making this movie and calling it “Wuthering Heights.” The movie cover is being put on Emily Brontë’s novel. This act is extremely misleading and disrespectful to the original story.

The movie was interesting and held my attention the whole time. The movie is quite worth seeing if you want to be entertained, as long as you go in aware that it is hardly a romance and it is certainly not Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”