Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell's modern take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, lands on digital purchase on June 11, 2026, then on VOD on June 17, 2026. Released in French cinemas on February 11, 2026, this romantic drama led by Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi and Hong Chau offers a gothic, pop and sensory reimagining of the Brontë classic.
Wuthering Heights
Film | 2026
Available for digital purchase on June 11, 2026
Available on VOD on June 17, 2026
In theaters on February 11, 2026
Romantic drama | Runtime: 2h16
From Emerald Fennell | Starring Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau
Original title: Wuthering Heights
Nationality: United Kingdom / United States
Rating: All audiences
Directed and written by Emerald Fennell, Wuthering Heights revisits the tormented relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Their bond spirals into a series of emotional tensions, shaped by family and social obstacles. The progression of their story underscores the impact of this passion on their world.
The story delves into the destructive emotions that bind the two characters. Their attachment fuels a spiral marked by breakups, reunions, vengeance, and lasting consequences that ripple across generations.
This new availability lets audiences discover or rewatch the film at home after its theatrical release. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment also announces several bonus features on the physical editions: The Legacy of Love and Madness, The Sons of Desire, The Making of a Feverish Dream as well as the director Emerald Fennell's commentary.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents the film as a bold reinterpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. The project is produced by Emerald Fennell, Josey McNamara and Margot Robbie. Tom Ackerley and Sara Desmond serve as executive producers. Principal photography leans on the director’s trusted collaborators, including Linus Sandgren on cinematography, Suzie Davies in production design, Victoria Boydell editing, and Jacqueline Durran in costumes. The original score features tracks composed by Charli XCX.
This version foregrounds natural settings, a dramatic mood, and a contemporary take on the story. The themes address thwarted love, emotional violence, desire, emotional dependency, and the characters’ struggle to escape their fate.
Our take on "Wuthering Heights":
With Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell directly confronts one of English literature’s most enduring monuments—not to offer a reverent adaptation, but to distill a work that is, above all, sensory, tactile, and visceral. From the opening frames, the film makes its stance clear: the moor becomes a playground for impulses, bodies surrender to debauchery, and the direction aims less to narrate than to provoke sensation. The “hangman’s ball” that starts the story acts as an aesthetic manifesto: excess here is not a deviation but a guiding principle.
This approach, deeply polarizing, threads through the entire film. Fennell favors emotional intensity and surface-level sensation over narrative rigor or the novel’s social complexity by Emily Brontë. The passion between Catherine and Heathcliff is staged as a toxic obsession—fed by egos, revenge, and raw desire—risking to strip the tale of its tragic and political dimensions. The film doesn’t seek analysis; it delivers, overflows, and saturates image and sound.
In formal terms, Wuthering Heights nonetheless leaves a striking impression. Linus Sandgren’s masterful cinematography elevates the wild landscapes, set design, and costumes, consistently bathed in a painterly light. Each shot feels conceived as an iconic image, sometimes verging on illustration, yet always sumptuous. The score, guttural and all-encompassing, cloaks the film in a suffocating atmosphere, intensifying the sensation of a long, sensuous vertigo more than a tightly plotted narrative.
That aesthetic excess is both the film’s strength and its flaw. One cannot deny the magnetic pull of this lush staging, yet very little of it endures once the credits roll. The emotion is immediate, almost physical, but hard to sustain over time. The moral darkness, social violence, and generational cruelty that give the Brontë novel its radical edge are relegated to the background here, absorbed by an erotic melodrama that prioritizes image impact over argumentative depth.
Wuthering Heights speaks primarily to viewers who crave excess, pop reinterpretations, and cinema objects that embrace the too much as an artistic stance. Those seeking an immersive, musically driven experience with contemporary-tinged visuals will find a hypnotic, sometimes fascinating film, never lukewarm. Fans of Fennell’s provocative approach in her earlier work will recognize a consistent authorial voice here.
Conversely, readers who prize the literary complexity of Wuthering Heights, its social critique, and moral provocation may feel left out. The film doesn’t engage in dialogue with the text: it traverses it, reshapes it, and sometimes empties it of substance. The ending, a touch elongated, reinforces the sense of an object surrendering to its own vertigo without always knowing how to escape.
A deeply divisive work, Wuthering Heights is less a faithful adaptation than a radical reappropriation. A feast for the eyes, unsettling at times, often frustrating in substance, the film confirms Fennell’s appetite for extreme sensory experiences. A bold but uneven cinematic gesture that will divide audiences for years: those willing to ride the storm of sensation, and those who will lament that Brontë’s tragedy lost a measure of its darkness and depth amid the visual onslaught.
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