Adaptation is everywhere! In 2026, MTC is running a new series called Adaptation Anxiety, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. We ask not whether these adaptations are good or bad, faithful or unfaithful to the source, but bigger questions about the logic underlying contemporary works of adaptation and why audiences have such big feelings about seeing precious characters on screen. Why, in other words, are we so anxious about the move from book to screen, and what does all this angst about the adaptation as a form tell us about our present relationships to these mediums?
I spent my Valentine’s Day with “Wuthering Heights.” It made for a mediocre date.
As anyone on the internet can tell you, Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights misses the mark of Emily Brontë’s novel. Nothing about it captures the scintillating passions – or socioeconomic turmoil – of the 1847 classic.
But is this “Wuthering Heights” a literary adaptation at all? Or something else? Fennell has defended the looseness of her adaptation by insisting that her movie isn’t trying to recreate the book itself, but instead tries to recapture her memory of the book. Personal nostalgia, not literary fidelity, is the name of the game. What has mostly gone unremarked, though, is that “Wuthering Heights” is still trying to be something that came before. Fennell’s movie is in fact the curious case of a film obsessed with another film adaptation of the same property: “Wuthering Heights” of 2026 recalls nothing so much as William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation. Instead of a private teenage fixation, is it possible Fennell was really remembering someone else’s movie?
Produced by Samuel Goldwyn and starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, Wyler’s film is the oldest extant screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights (sadly, a 1920 silent movie adaptation has been lost). It’s this version which first carved up the novel into palatable fare for the screen: according to a reviewer for The New York Times, the 1939 production was a positive upgrade on the novel’s multigenerational saga, “far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.” For the most part, Fennell’s version sticks to the romantic plot of the first half that the 1939 film draws from. This means excising the second act of the novel, allowing both movies to sidestep Heathcliff’s slow vengeance on the second generation, as well as the incestuous entanglements of Part II. In lieu of novelistic complexity, Wyler made his version into a story that was easy to follow: a tale of two people who loved and lost. This also happened to be the shape of the golden age Hollywood melodrama.
As Heathcliff and Cathy, Olivier and Oberon seemed drawn together not by fate nor the shared fabric of souls, but were instead pulled by inexorably toward one another by the star system’s gravitational field (Olivier reportedly fought hard to have his real lover, Vivien Leigh, cast opposite him, to no avail). Who wouldn’t line up to see two of the hottest and biggest names collide on screen? Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, touted (bizarrely) as the “Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor” of their generation, are presumably meant to mimic this kind of golden age celebrity chemistry. Unlike Burton and Taylor, though, who were so successfully cast opposite one another that it obliterated both of their marriages, Elordi and Robbie have barely enough chemistry on screen, let alone off, to read as thwarted lovers. Fennell isn’t interested in character so much as the combined wattage of star power.
If Elordi and Robbie’s on-screen romance (and off-screen antics) grasp at the studio system of Wyler’s production, the movie’s design borrows even more directly. As with Wyler before her, Fennell opts for a combination of real-life locations and soundstage sets in “Wuthering Heights.” And while Wyler was at the cutting-edge of the day’s film technology, in 2026 the contrast between soundstage and location reads as its own period reference. Foreshortened shots of the interior worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange each feel as though we are crammed into not only the artifice of a historical world, but the artifice of another age of storytelling. That Isabella Linton holds the keys to a dollhouse version of the Grange is a useful gloss on the film itself: we’re looking into a world in miniature, brittle and eggshell blue. For Wyler’s audiences, soundstage sets might have passed without comment. In 2026, they give the impression that Fennell wants to keep drawing our attention to the way the movie stages its own interiors as movie interiors, whose campiness magnifies the intensity of the onscreen romance. When we are finally met with expansive shots of the Yorkshire moors, it feels like we – along with Heathcliff and Cathy – can finally exhale. Even these, half the time, turn out to be carefully printed backdrops.
Yet for all that Fennell seems to push her audience towards old Hollywood, it’s not clear how comfortable she is acknowledging the specific pull of Wyler’s film, or pondering the politics of 1939. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran, for instance, has played coy about the film’s references. “Our dates are all confused in the sense that we’re not representing a moment in time at all,” she told Vogue. In support of this sense of timelessness, Durran borrows from an eclectic array of period inspirations, from nineteenth-century portraiture to ‘50s ads. Yet Wyler’s film still feels like the strongest inspiration for the film’s costumes: Robbie is swathed in hoop skirts and furs, or glitters in an almost exact replica of Merle Oberon’s diamond tiara. These are less ahistorical – or “confused” – than fairly exact homages to Wyler’s Wuthering Heights.
Wyler lifted Brontë’s plot out of the latter eighteenth century and reset the story in the 1860s. Produced in the same year as Gone with the Wind, Wyler’s movie followed the fashions popular from cinematic Civil War epics, the director reportedly having found more period accurate costumes drab. That the poster for Fennell’s movie recreates the poster for Gone with the Wind is a dead giveaway that, on some level, Fennell is hungry for the feel of the movies of 1939, a season of cinema that was itself shot through with its own strange nostalgia for the romance and strife of a vanished world, no matter how abhorrent that world’s politics. And while Wyler’s Wuthering Heights is no hymn to the South, we might ask why, in 2026, Fennell has her heart set on a vague flavour of 1939 at all.
Fennell’s film plays out like a perverted fantasia set in Wyler’s world. There are shots of viscous egg yolks, dog collars, walls hung in the exact shade and coloration of Cathy’s skin, handpicked and paid for by Shazad Latif’s Edgar Linton. That this makes for queasy viewing comes as no surprise from the director of Saltburn. But watching Fennell try to shock her audience, I couldn’t help feeling like the film’s heart was ultimately set on the romance of the melodrama. Cathy and Heathcliff are aroused by, but never together partake in, the sexual subversion that surrounds them. In one especially hyped scene, the pair play peeping toms as two servants experiment with a little stable-yard bondage. From their vantage point in the attic above, piled breathlessly on top of one another, yet (modestly) still clothed, Heathcliff and Cathy drool. The scene reads like some kind of Chekhov’s gun of sexual maturation: when will our two leads, in turn, do unspeakable things to each other? The moment never arrives. Their own brand of sadomasochism turns out to be emotional rather than physical. For all that Fennell wants to create a film where desire has the power to thrill and degrade, this possibility never really touches the lovers. The movie wants us to know that Cathy and Heathcliff are soulmates separated by cruel circumstance who inflict pain as a by-product of misunderstanding, not because there might be something fucked up about who they are and what they want. This is why the two often feel stuck in the language of Wyler’s movie: theirs is a passion so true and so sweeping that it can only be expressed by melodrama, telegraphed by ceaseless homage to a bygone age of cinema.
If there’s any illicit desire at work in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” it’s the way the movie lusts after other movies. Fennell’s film insists that most cataclysmic on-screen romance we can watch in 2026 is really a portal to an older kind of moviemaking, a way to return to a visual world that isn’t easily accessible anymore. It put me in mind of Susan Sontag’s writing on film, when she describes how, generations ago, people fell in love with popular movies as a kind of art that was “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral – all at the same time.” This feeling, according to Sontag, has died out. I’ve been thinking about these words every now and then since I watched “Wuthering Heights.” It wants to capture a feeling. It wants a cinema at once erotic and moral, and the strength of that want takes the place of people wanting each other. No wonder the love scenes between Elordi and Robbie ring hollow. In “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell can’t muster up a tale of yearning; she can only yearn to make us yearn.
Maddy Trépanier is a PhD student at Yale University, working on early modern literature. Her favorite off-kilter Wuthering Heights is the Kate Bush song.
“Wuthering Heights” (2026) dir. Emerald Fennell, Warner Bros. Pictures. Wuthering Heights (1939) dir. William Wyler, MGM Studios. Gone With the Wind (1939) dir. Victor Fleming, Warner Bros. .
Article thumbnail photo: Morning Effect, Claude Monet (1889).