WUTHERING HEIGHTS
- Serge Leterrier
- Jan 16
- 4 min read
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Emerald Fennell and Passion as an Abyss
By Serge Leterrier
“What if literature’s greatest love story was, in truth, a tale of mutual destruction?”
On February 13, 2026, Emerald Fennell takes hold of Emily Brontë’s monument with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi—a collision poised to reawaken one of English literature’s most ravaging myths. But beyond the cinematic event, something deeper is at stake: a meditation on passion as a force that does not elevate—only consumes.
Emerald Fennell, Filmmaker of Obsession
With Promising Young Woman (2020) and Saltburn (2023), Emerald Fennell has established herself as a singular director, drawn to the dark machinery of desire and the toxic choreography of obsession. Her characters are never passive victims or conventional heroes; they are beings devoured by an impulse larger than themselves—captives of their own inner abysses.
Whether she films Cassie’s methodical revenge in Promising Young Woman or Oliver’s mortifying fascination with Felix in Saltburn, Fennell keeps circling the same question: what happens when desire turns pathological, when love becomes a curse? Her cinema is not moralizing. It observes, dissects, and exposes the most troubling springs of the human soul—with unsettling visual elegance and unsparing lucidity.
That is precisely why she feels like the ideal artist to approach Wuthering Heights. Because if Emily Brontë wrote one of literature’s greatest love stories, she also delivered one of its most merciless studies of passion as destruction.
The Myth of Wuthering Heights
Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights remains one of the most radical texts in Romantic literature. The story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is not a fairy tale thwarted by social convention. It is the narrative of an impossible fusion—an love that refuses limits and would rather choose damnation than separation.
Catherine and Heathcliff are not simply in love: they experience themselves as two halves of the same entity. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine declares in one of the most famous lines in literature—not I love him, but I am him. This collapse of identity, this inability to distinguish one from the other, is the novel’s tragic knot.
When Catherine chooses to marry Edgar Linton as a social calculation, she doesn’t merely betray Heathcliff—she tears herself apart. And Heathcliff, rather than accept the separation, devotes his life to a methodical vengeance that destroys everything in its path, including himself. In Brontë’s universe, absolute love has only one exit: madness or death.
Many screen adaptations (William Wyler in 1939, Peter Kosminsky in 1992, Andrea Arnold in 2011) have often softened this darkness, leaning into romance at the expense of the psychological violence that runs through the text. Fennell, one suspects, will not share those polite instincts.
Passion as Spiritual Damnation
What makes Wuthering Heights so hypnotic is the vertigo of its central question: what if absolute love is a curse rather than a grace? What if total fusion between two beings is not the dreamed-of spiritual fulfillment, but the very impossibility of evolution?
Catherine and Heathcliff are trapped in a bond so total that they cannot exist without each other—nor truly live together. Their love is not an opening toward the other; it is capture, possession, the dissolution of boundaries. They do not love each other: they devour each other. And that mutual devouring condemns them to a hopeless wandering—prisoners of an incarnation they reject, yet cannot escape.
There is something profoundly metaphysical in this dead end. Catherine and Heathcliff wage war against the limits of human existence. They refuse compromise, adaptation, and the renunciations society demands. But that refusal does not lift them up—it shackles them. Their passion becomes confinement, their fusion becomes suffocation, their fidelity becomes damnation.
Brontë wrote one of the most powerful meditations on the failure of romantic love as a spiritual path. Catherine and Heathcliff transcend nothing: they repeat the same lethal pattern, obsessively. Their story is not a love obstructed by the world; it is a love that refuses the world until it destroys itself.
This is the dimension Fennell is uniquely positioned to awaken. Her gaze—both empathetic and merciless—could film this passion without complacency, revealing the terrible beauty of a cursed love without romanticizing it. Because Wuthering Heights is not a plea for mad love. It is its autopsy.
An Unmissable Cinematic Appointment
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi will play Catherine and Heathcliff—two actors capable of letting violence seep beneath sensuality, obsession beneath devotion. Robbie has already proven, from I, Tonya to Barbie, that she can carry complex, contradictory roles. Elordi, sharpened by Euphoria and Saltburn, possesses that dark intensity—the ability to inhabit desire’s troubled zones, and the quiet menace of domination.
Under Fennell’s direction, we can expect a film that is visually sumptuous and psychologically brutal—one that refuses narrative comfort. A film that will not ask us to like its characters, but to understand the abyss into which they have hurled themselves. A necessary work, at a time when popular culture still celebrates “passionate love” without interrogating its shadows.
Wuthering Heights opens February 13, 2026—a date not to be missed by anyone who still believes cinema can confront the most enigmatic regions of the human soul.
For Diamont Média
