Literary adaptations are getting lusty again — Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is making sure of it

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is quickly shaping up to be one of 2026’s most exciting, ambitious and creatively unapologetic literary adaptations. It’s a version of Emily Brontë’s novel that leans into everything that has made it unforgettable for nearly two centuries: the passion, the danger, the destructive love and the primal pull of its central relationship. With Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi leading the cast as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and Charli xcx composing an original album inspired by the story, the film is designed not simply to revisit Brontë’s work, but to electrify it for a new generation.

Earlier this autumn, Fennell spoke about the project publicly for the first time in Brontë’s hometown of Haworth. “I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it,” she told the BBC, recalling her teenage reaction to the book. “It’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal. Sexual.” For Fennell, whose previous films Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023) showcase a bold, psychologically-charged filmmaking style, Wuthering Heights represents both a long-held dream and a profound creative risk. The director has described the 1847 novel as “so sexy”, “so horrible” and “so devastating”, and has cited it as the film she’s wanted to make the “most desperately” for years. Now, after the success of Saltburn, Fennell has finally had the freedom to choose it as her next project. “I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she has admitted. 

That intensity shapes every artistic decision. Though retaining much of Brontë’s original dialogue in the adaptation, Fennell has been open about her decision to take liberties casting-wise — Robbie and Elordi are older than Brontë’s teenage characters. Fennell, however, saw something uncanny in both leads. Elordi, fresh off a career-defining run that began with the director’s own Saltburn and, most recently, included Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, struck Fennell immediately. On the set of Saltburn, she’s alleged to have said the actor looked “exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”. Robbie’s Catherine, meanwhile, channels an almost mythic charisma. “She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met,” Fennell has said. Her performance promises to capture Catherine’s contradictions with force and sophistication.

Supporting the film’s emotional landscape is Charli xcx, whose forthcoming album Wuthering Heights (out on 13 February 13 2026) serves as a companion piece. xcx has already released two singles , ‘House’ featuring John Cale, and a few days later, ‘Chains of Love’. Her involvement signals the project’s contemporary sensibility — a willingness to bridge Brontë’s nineteenth-century ferocity with the urgent, emotionally-charged world of modern pop. But rather than updating the story, the music amplifies it, reinforcing the passion, fire and pulse Fennell sees in the original text.

Ultimately, what sets this Wuthering Heights apart is its clarity of purpose. Fennell is making a film driven by emotion — primal, sensual and unsettling. It is a Wuthering Heights that embraces complexity rather than avoiding it. One that sees the novel not as a fragile artifact, but as a living, breathing, overwhelming force. The trailer is full of longing stares, sexual tension and tightened corsets, exploring a story of obsessive love in an adaptation that’s as steamy as it is artistic. And it’s no better proven than in the film’s costume design, which sees Robbie in a white, glittery wedding dress, centuries ahead of its time. Highlighting Fennell’s distinctive aesthetic, it’s less about period accuracy and more about creating a heightened, visually-intoxicating world.

The trailer, then, has only intensified the debate circling the film months ahead of its release. Viewers remain divided over the casting and the adaptation’s unapologetic eroticism. Marketed as “a bold and original imagining of one of the greatest love stories of all time”, the argument rages on: was Wuthering Heights ever a love story to begin with? Either way, with its powerhouse cast, visionary director, impressive set design and an album that promises to become a cultural moment in its own right, Wuthering Heights is poised to redefine what a classic adaptation can be. It is ready to be experienced passionately, provocatively and without apology on 13 February next year.