Fifty Shades of Red

I saw Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights last night. Author Emily Brontë makes passion anything but simple or glamorous in her novel upon which the film is loosely based. Love curdles into obsession, cruelty echoes across generations, and nearly every character harbors a capacity for startling emotional violence. The novel is steeped in moral ambiguity—a stormy landscape of memory, resentment, and desire that refuses to resolve into anything as tidy as romance.

Brontë wrote her novel in roughly the same literary moment that Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. There’s a scene in Little Women where Professor Bhaer urges Jo March to abandon her sensational “blood-and-thunder” stories and instead write something she truly knows—a quiet argument for emotional truth over spectacle.

Watching Fennell’s adaptation, that advice kept echoing in my mind. Her rendition of Wuthering Heights is quite literally full of both blood and thunder, and she seems far less interested in Brontë’s shades of gray than in a single, overwhelming color: red.

Red saturates the film—draped across costumes, flooding interiors, splashed across the screen until it feels less like symbolism and more like a blunt instrument. The message is unmistakable: desire, carnality, appetite. The film doesn’t hint at these things; it practically shouts them. The effect is less an invitation into the novel’s darker psychological currents than a repeated visual insistence on sensuality.

Visually, the movie is often stunning. The costumes are lush, the sets opulent, and every frame looks meticulously composed. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are undeniably striking leads—beautiful, magnetic, and perfectly suited to the film’s aesthetic of heightened passion.

But beauty alone can’t carry the weight of Brontë’s story.

Rather than attempting to capture the full breadth of the novel’s sprawling narrative, the film treats Wuthering Heights as a springboard. Much of the original cast disappears, along with more than half the plot, leaving the film focused almost exclusively on the volatile relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine.

This narrowing of scope makes the performances even more crucial, which is why the film’s treatment of Heathcliff feels especially thin. Elordi recently moved from playing one monster—Frankenstein—to a another that could have offered heartbreaking complexity. Here, though, he’s simply monstrous, and the film gives him little room to be anything else. His revenge becomes a series of obsessive one‑upmanships rather than the tragic, corrosive spiral Brontë envisioned.

One of the film’s most revealing choices comes after the death of Catherine’s father. In the novel, loss and social upheaval deepen the characters’ emotional fractures. In Fennell’s version, the moment feels almost like a release valve—as if the absence of authority suddenly grants Catherine and Heathcliff permission to fully indulge their desires and become the couple they were always destined to be. Not tragic lovers, but something closer to mutually destructive forces.

The film leans hard into this interpretation. Catherine and Heathcliff aren’t complex psychological figures so much as embodiments of raw instinct—beautiful, impulsive, and increasingly monstrous together. Their relationship becomes less about emotional entanglement and more about unrestrained appetite.

The film also alters the dynamics around Isabella, a change that subtly reshapes the emotional stakes. In Brontë’s novel, Isabella is Edgar Linton’s innocent, sheltered younger sister—and Catherine’s sister‑in‑law—which makes Heathcliff’s marriage to her a pointed act of revenge: an intrusion into Catherine’s new family and a deliberate weaponization of intimacy. It’s one of his cruelest turns, exposing the depth of his bitterness and his capacity for emotional violence.

Fennell instead recasts Isabella as Edgar’s ward, a shift that loosens those familial bonds and softens the sense of betrayal. As a ward, she feels less integral to the Linton household and more like a peripheral dependent, which weakens the impact of Heathcliff’s cruelty toward her. What should register as a devastating escalation becomes another provocative flourish—consistent with the film’s emphasis on spectacle but lacking the emotional reckoning that gives the episode its power.

In the end, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is undeniably sumptuous—meticulously designed, confidently performed, and visually arresting. But beneath the richness lies a surprisingly thin interpretation, a romance painted almost entirely in crimson, where passion overwhelms complexity and spectacle replaces the darker, more unsettling truths that have kept Wuthering Heights haunting readers for nearly two centuries.