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Longtime readers will know that I’m a big Brontë fan, having worked on a Masters in English lit focused around the sisters’ writing. Here on the blog, I’ve ranked most every previous filmed version of Wuthering Heights, taken a deep-dive into my favorite, and finally said, stop, enough, we don’t need to make any more screen versions!
And yet, here we are, with director/screenwriter Emerald Fennell making her version, “Wuthering Heights” — set to premiere on February 13, 2026, for Valentine’s Day, because she sees it as a love story. Fennell told BFI:
“Since its publication 200 years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights’s validity as a love story. It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story nonetheless.”
OK, fine, but this isn’t a 1970s Harlequin Romance novel like the promo posters styles it:
Fabio called & wants his royalty check.
Or reaching farther (and more ickily) back to copy:
Back when Pride & Prejudice (2005) came out, we had a Snark Week guest post titled Beware the Ampersand because that ampersand warned us of “a new, more relevant, more hip and urgent version” that we didn’t need of the classic Austen story. Similarly, Fennell has surrounded her title with quotation marks to warn us that her version is going to be a batshit crazy “update” of Emily Brontë’s oft-misunderstood poetry.
She explained those quotation marks in a Fandango interview, saying:
“You can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is, I’m making a version of it. And also a version that — there’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t. But really, I’d say that any adaptation of a novel, especially a novel like this, should have quotation marks around it.”
What Fennell was trying to say, the BBC made more clear in an early interview:
“I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.”
She suggested that some of her risqué additions are things she thought she had remembered from reading the book as a teenager — but weren’t actually in there when she returned to it.
“It’s where I filled in the gaps aged 14,” she said with a smile, adding that making the film had allowed her to “see what it would feel like to fulfill my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad.”
Yup, we’re getting teenage fanfic on the big screen. And for as much that she’s adding, Fennell isn’t even using the whole book — she’s stopping halfway through after Cathy’s death, as confirmed by the Guardian and other sources. So really, WTFrock is going on in this movie???
Let’s take a look at the official teaser and the official trailer and try to find out!
I’ve posted both of these to our Facebook page and the comments were golden, including:
Greatest love story of all time? Did we read the same source material?
I actually truly dislike Wuthering Heights … but this travesty of a trailer makes me feel almost solicitous and defensive on WH‘s behalf, something I would have thought impossible.
A Wuthering Heights inspired product.
“Heathcliff, it’s me I’m Barbie, I’ve come home…”
No heights were wuthered in the making of this film.
Jacob and Margot are ridiculously pretty people and good actors, but this film makes 90210 look like age-appropriate casting.
contains 5% real Wuthering Heights.
Whatever is left of Emily is spinning at 300 rpm in her narrow little coffin.
Not sure I could top that world-class snark, so I’m just going to lean in hard on the costumes themselves because what we can tell of the supposed story is so ridiculously off the mark that it’s not worth further discussion. And no, I won’t be rushing out to watch it in the theater! I’ll wait till it comes out on streaming so I can be dutifully horrified at home with a big bottle of wine and soft things to throw at the screen, as is right and proper.
The costume designer is Jacqueline Durran, who is extremely skilled but not always our favorite around here. She sometimes works with directors fond of stripping down historical stories and fashions so they’re more “relatable” and modernized — the 2005 Pride & Prejudice & Pigs being a foremost example. But that looks positively period accurate in comparison to this weird wuthering wreck! Durran told Vogue:
“Our dates are all confused in the sense that we’re not representing a moment in time at all — we’re just picking images or styles that we like for each character.”
There ya go. Hot mess central. We’ve said before we could get onboard with a movie messing with historical accuracy if there’s a real vision and purpose for it. Not just modernizing or making it “sexy” or doing haute couture. And definitely not just picking random shit for everyone! This movie’s costume designer is admitting her work is a hodgepodge, and neither she nor the director seem to have any cohesive design for this film. Just do big, flashy stuff! Whoo-hoo!
That same Vogue interview has lots of pix that I’m going to crib from, so enjoy until someone complains and I have to take them down…
The costume designer says this dirndl costume starts the shitshow:
“This is the first time we see adult Cathy. As the film opens, we’re trying to lay out our intentions — this is a stylized version of Wuthering Heights, and it’s difficult to nail this look because it has a nod to the period, a nod to contemporary fashion, and also a nod to Old Hollywood. It has all the themes that we want to bring in visually to the movie, so it was about meshing it all together. It’s a costume and you know it’s a costume — and it’s not necessarily realistic or unrealistic.”
Way to lower expectations! Yes, this is a costumey costume.
Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Is she more Swiss Miss or St. Pauli Girl? Discuss.
The skirt looks like a picnic tablecloth & the trim looks like it was designed by a kindergartener.
Next up, Cathy’s wedding dress, presumably for her wedding to Edgar, if things faintly resemble the book, unless maybe it’s a fever-dream wedding to Heathcliff, IDK MAN. The costume designer told Vogue:
“The wedding dress was an amalgam of Victorian and 1950s fashion — from [Franz Xaver] Winterhalter to Charles James.”
Btw, if you’ve read my previous Brontë articles (or the actual novel!), you’d know that main action of Wuthering Heights takes place from 1780 to 1784. So nothing to do with painter Winterhalter (1805-1873) or fashion designer Charles James (1906-1978).
And really, you’re flattering yourself if you think this is reminiscent of Winterhalter or Charles James. This is just a big white modern ballgown, nothing special.
There’s several big white dresses Margot Robbie wears as Cathy, and they all have various levels of WTFrockery. These seem to center around a white waist-cincher with a very pointy center front. She’s wearing it over some kind of fantasy puffy sleeved dress in a few scenes.
The dress is trimmed with that dorky eyelet lace that you can thread a ribbon through the center of; here, they used a bright red ribbon, because nothing is subtle.
She wears the same outfit outside with a giant straw hat trimmed with silly gold shooting-star pins (tiny saving grace, the hat’s ribbons are not tied over the hat, whew). Nelly has a very nice, period-looking parasol. BUT WHY ARE THEY EATING COMICALLY LARGE STRAWBERRIES??
Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures.
The same dress turns up in another scene, now accessorized with a big ol’ honkin’ jeweled cross (is she religious all of a sudden?) and tiny red sunglasses (is she a vampire?). The smarmy dude in ill-fitting clothes next to her is Edgar, and that looks like a pair of lobsters wearing top hats are sitting in her lap (is it a Friends reference, which, omg why?).
The pointy waist-cincher shows up again with a different outfit, in the high-shine red-floored room, which must be a real pain in the butt to keep clean. Not surprisingly, the production design in this movies is OTT banana-pants too.
Photo by Jaap Buitendijk.
That waist-cincher gets worn yet again for a fairy princess look with a dress made from sparkly cross-hatched tulle. Jacqueline Durran said they made 45 to 50 costumes for Cathy, and I wonder how many are this gathered peasant-y style, which is pretty easy to bang out (I’ve been making them for myself since I was an angsty 14 year old; take that, Emerald Fennell!).
Finally, Cathy ditches that waist-cincher and gets to the wedding night. Oh wait … the costume designer told Vogue:
“One image Emerald showed me was this amazing 1950s picture of a woman wrapped up in cellophane, like a gift with a bow around the middle. That was the starting point for this look, and we thought, how can we recreate this? It’s about Cathy being a gift on her wedding night, making herself a gift.”
Nooo, not wrapped in plastic!
Twin Peaks (1990)
Or maybe this is your reference of choice? (Also, what was going on in the early ’90s?)
Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
Compare to our Cathy…
Photo by Jaap Buitendijk.
Maybe Jacqueline Durran still had her success with Barbie (2024) on her mind:
Because none of that is even vaguely related to Emily Brontë. We’ve very much lost the plot.
Wait, we still haven’t gotten to the red latex dress! Which Jacqueline Durran thought it was important to point out: “It’s actually not latex — it’s just an ultra shiny, synthetic, plasticized contemporary fabric.” BECAUSE THAT’S SO VERY DIFFERENT. eyeroll “Latex” is technically a rubberized fabric that’s often stretchy and may have either a shiny or dull surface. The term is often used interchangeably with “PVC” and “vinyl” for shiny plasticized fabrics, so c’mon, lady, give me a break. We’re all talking about the same thing.
Anyway, the costume designer continued in her description of this stupid costume:
“We used this look in this scene because it was about combining the dress and the set in a really artificial and highly stylized way, because it has this rubberized, high-shine red floor. They seem to blend into each other, and then the walls of the library are white like her blouse.”
I guess she’s saying the carpet matches the drapes, got it.
Cathy also gets a shiny (but not latex!) black dress, which Durran says is:
“It’s something that takes you out of the period, but it was exciting to mix the shape of a Victorian dress with a fabric that was completely modern.”
Photo by Jaap Buitendijk.
Yup, takes me out of period alright. Completely modern. Would be cool on the red carpet or at the Met Gala, sure. Doesn’t make any sense in Wuthering Heights. Also, Edgar still looks like he’s wearing clothes too big for him or that just don’t fit. Yet the costume designer insisted that for him:
“Everything was really incorrect for the period — shiny, sparkly, overdone — but the actual shapes and silhouettes of [Edgar’s] clothes are quite accurate. We just chose fabrics that would never normally be used for a Victorian gentleman’s clothes.”
Definitely shiny. Kind of greasy too.
Since we’re looking at the Lintons, how about Isabella? In Vogue, the costume designer makes some bold claims:
“Our references for her were much more based in the historical period than Margot’s — specifically the 1860s. I particularly love the skirt shape from the 1860s, and we looked in fashion manuals of the period for all the ways in which people would trim things and add bows and lace, and how complicated their dresses would be and how fussy. Isabella, as a character, is someone who’d spend all day making ribbons and bows and trimmings, so we just really went to town with that idea.”
Are you ready? Here’s Cathy, on the left, and Isabella, on the right:
Photo by Jaap Buitendijk.
1860s! HAHAHHAHA! This is to 1860s as Durran’s costumes for Anna Karenina (2012) are to 1870s. A wink and a nod, sure, but hardly based in the historical period. (And again, let me remind folks that 1860s has zero to do with Wuthering Heights; Emily Brontë died in 1848, after all.) Maybe she’s just confused which Margot Robbie flick she’s working on again…
Happy Birthday Barbie
The last few costumes worth discussing from the trailer and articles floating around on the internet are this black dress, which looks like a copy of Cathy’s wedding dress, but in sparkly black material and worn with another big honkin’ gold cross (it’s all appropriate for a funeral, right?):
And this red and white floral outfit:
The rest of those whackadoodle costumes make this last one look tame in comparison. The bodice has a slightly 18th-century shape and her hair is up in a not-goofy fashion.
Speaking of hair … usually, when Margot Robbie has her hair up in this movie, it looks like she has 1940s victory rolls.
Cute, but, oh yeah, ‘our dates are all confused.’
1945 – Rita Hayworth
Not much better when sparkles are added (to the hair or cheeks).
Then there’s the fishtail braid, all the better to angst in (wait, is that a padded wall?).
In the Fandango interview Margot Robbie asked Emerald Fennell: “‘What’s your dream for the project?’ She said, ‘I want people to cry so hard they vomit.’” Anyone feeling a little queasy just looking at these costumes?
Let me leave you with one more image from the trailer — you know they had to go there, yes, obligatory corset chafing! Somehow Fennell thinks it’s sexy, but then, maybe she really is a masochist?
Fennell told the Guardian, “I can’t make something for everyone,” and hoo-boy, she was right.
Will you watch this “Wuthering Heights”?
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