"Wuthering Heights" (2026)

Surely it’s clear now that if you want to adapt a classic text in this era, it’s got to be as a divisive art piece.

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights could be another harbinger of that change if that hadn’t already been obvious.

This is how to now turn a novel often only thought of as an ‘academic’ text into a modern blockbuster.

High fashion, bawdy, arty and somewhat ‘punk rock,’ this will surely split audiences down the middle in all the right ways.

If anything, it’s actually not quite as subversive or controversial as it, perhaps, could have been or is being touted as.

It makes the requisite changes to the story, and elevates the erotica element somewhat, but could very easily have gone further.

It hasn’t quite got the punch of Fennell’s previous Promising Young Woman and Saltburn.

However, it is at once classic and modern.

Still hewing faithfully to the setting and the time period but adding an eye-poppingly beautiful mix of fashion a la Marie Antoinette, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Clueless et al.

Everything here is just sumptuous. The designs of everything and the surrealist touches keep your eyes constantly salivating at the screen.

A simplified story nonetheless is dripping in metaphor and desire and it’s matched by true ‘movie star’ performances from Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

Traditionalists be damned, whilst probably not quite touching the highs of her previous two films, it’s another destined-to-be-cult classic from Fennell and, hopefully, another influential film for literary adaptations to come.

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