If you’re walking into Emerald Fennell’s 2026 take on Wuthering Heights expecting a careful, page-by-page translation of Emily Brontë’s novel, you’re going to have a brief moment of “Wait, what?” The film, starring Margot Robbie as Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, is built around mood, obsession, and a very specific kind of romantic menace.

It’s closer to a feverish retelling of what the story feels like than a strict recreation of what the story does.

The Story Is Narrowed to the First Half of the Novel

This is the change that affects everything else. Brontë’s book is really two books stitched together. The first generation’s catastrophe, and then the second generation living in the fallout.

The 2026 film largely sticks to Cathy and Heathcliff’s arc and ends around Cathy’s death. This means the “next-gen” material is either removed or dramatically reduced.

Lockwood and the Nested Narration Are Basically Gone

In the novel, we meet Wuthering Heights through a frame. Mr. Lockwood arrives, gets creeped out, and Nelly Dean tells him the story. That structure does a lot of work. It creates distance, ambiguity, and the sense that you’re hearing a legend filtered through people who may not be telling it cleanly.

Catherine and Heathcliff Are Aged Up

Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are essentially kids when the story begins, and the tragedy hits fast and young. The film ages them into adults, aligning the characters with Robbie and Elordi’s screen presence. This turns the relationship into a more consciously chosen self-destruction, rather than something that begins as feral childhood attachment.

This shift also changes how you read Cathy’s decisions. In the novel, her choice to marry Edgar is tangled up with youth, class training, and the blunt reality of what “security” means for a teenage girl in that world. In the film, it can read more like a grown woman making a brutal compromise and believing she can manage the consequences.

The Earnshaw Family Dynamic Is Reshuffled, and Hindley Takes a Hit

If you’re scanning the film looking for Hindley Earnshaw as a major player, you’re not imagining things. The novel’s toxic triangle depends on Hindley’s resentment and his later power over Heathcliff, while Mr. Earnshaw is comparatively warm toward the foundling he brings home.

Fennell reassigns a lot of that rot. Martin Clunes’s Mr. Earnshaw becomes a harsher, more volatile force, and the household’s collapse is tied more directly to him. It’s a cleaner villain shape for a two-hour film, but it also removes one of Brontë’s sharpest ideas: that the family’s cruelty isn’t only one bad man, it’s a whole ecosystem that keeps producing damage.

Isabella Is Rewritten Into a Different Kind of Story

In the novel, Isabella Linton is naive, then devastated, then surprisingly resilient in the aftermath. She’s not a joke, and she’s not simply there to be punished for bad romantic instincts.

The 2026 film gives Alison Oliver’s Isabella a more stylized, provocative arc. It leans into motifs of girlhood performance and sexual power dynamics. It’s bolder in a modern-symbolism way, but it also pushes her further from Brontë’s version, where her suffering is neither sexy nor instructive, it’s just horrifying.

Sex Is Brought to the Surface, but the Darkest Taboos Are Removed

Here’s the irony: people went in expecting something scandalous, but the film is also, in several ways, “less disturbing” than the book. Brontë’s text is full of cruelty and taboo implications that can feel genuinely grotesque when you sit with them. Fennell’s version makes the relationship more openly sexual on-screen, turning what the novel keeps largely unspoken into something physical and explicit.

Heathcliff’s “Otherness” Is Handled Differently

This is where “faithful” gets complicated, because Brontë’s book is both ambiguous and pointed. Heathcliff is repeatedly described as racially othered, foreign, unknowable, and that outsider status isn’t decorative. It’s central to how characters justify abusing him, and it feeds the story’s violence.

Casting Jacob Elordi shifts that dynamic. The film reportedly gives even less textual attention to Heathcliff’s origins, while also using more color-conscious casting choices elsewhere in the ensemble. Depending on your lens, that either modernizes the story’s social world or muddies one of the novel’s most important tensions.

The Soundtrack and Stylization Reshape the Whole Vibe

This isn’t the windswept, dutiful prestige version. The film uses a modern-facing music approach, including original songs associated with Charli XCX and a score by Anthony Willis, which adds a contemporary pulse to a period setting.

So, is it faithful?

It’s faithful to the obsession at the center, and less faithful to the novel’s structure, its long echo of consequences, and its messy moral ambiguity. Think of it as a remix that grabs the most combustible relationship and builds an entire movie around the heat of it. If you want Brontë’s full architecture, this won’t replace the book. If you want a stylish, emotionally legible plunge into the moor-soaked myth, it’s at least a fascinating swing.