Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ really ‘smooth-brained’ and ‘idiotic’? Why we can’t stop arguing about the depraved classic.

Water is wet, the weather in the English moors is dreadful and a psychosexual romantic drama about two outrageously cruel soulmates has the internet in an uproar.

Perhaps it was fated, just like Heathcliff and Catherine, that the 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights would be controversial — moral scrutiny about the exasperating love story is as old as the original 1847 Emily Brontë novel itself.

In fact, people have been mad about writer-director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the book since it was announced that A-listers Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi would play the leads. People said Robbie’s too old, Elordi’s too white and Fennell can’t be trusted with stories of class and violence — all fair critiques, leveled long before they’d suited up in period-inaccurate costumes to scream at each other in the rain.

So is the movie good? To some. Will it be a financial success? It’s already well on its way, grossing $34.8 million in ticket sales in three days. But what outshines the usual metrics is a movie’s ability to generate conversation, and Wuthering Heights has clearly broken the viewing public’s brains for a confluence of reasons, including our rage-bait media environment, our culture’s current tendency toward puritanism, and the fact that Catherine and Heathcliff are and have always been avowed sociopaths.

It’s been delicious to watch all the discourse unfold — cinema is back, baby — so let’s dig into all the rancor.

Wuthering Heights has been enraging critics for 179 years

Wuthering Heights is not a nice book. As a child, Catherine’s family takes in Heathcliff, a mistreated boy, and he’s forced to work for them. Catherine and Heathcliff are best friends, though they are divided by class and status. As she grows up, Catherine realizes, with an air of mean-spiritedness, that she’ll need to marry rich to get out of here. She does so, betraying Heathcliff, who runs off — and unexpectedly also becomes rich.

When he returns, they continue their toxic situationship, torturing each other by flirting with their wealthy neighbors, the Linton siblings. They both suck — they’re cruel and sadistic to everyone around them — but they have an otherworldly draw to one another, fueled by a series of some of the greatest lines in literary history: “You say I killed you? Haunt me then!” Come on. “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” The gorgeousness of the writing distracts from the evil they inflict upon each other and others. It’s uncomfortable to behold, but it inspires complex discussions about love, abuse and class dynamics, which is why it’s a staple in English classrooms.

People not familiar with this saga might have been thrown off by the way Fennell’s adaptation was billed — as the greatest love story ever told.

How could the greatest love story ever told, wrapped up in fantastical aesthetics and fabulous gowns, be so dark and unsettling? Because it’s great, as in epic; not good, as in moral. Catherine and Heathcliff are bad people doomed to haunt each other into oblivion. They’re also soulmates. You’re not supposed to be like them, and they’re not supposed to end up together, but that nuance is hard to digest in an era in which people equate the moral purity of media with its artistic prowess.

In 2026, people struggle to enjoy movies with even light emotional cheating, as with the Netflix romantic comedy People We Meet on Vacation. They dislike character studies of selfish characters on the grounds of their behavior, as with Timothée Chalamet’s movie about a ping-pong-playing menace, Marty Supreme. Of course they’re having a hard time with aggressive displays of narcissism and vengeance.

We can’t wholly fault modern audiences though — this happened when the book came out too. The original Wuthering Heights inspired outrage for its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” and Brontë originally published the work under a man’s name. “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,” wrote one reviewer in 1848. How dare someone question society by putting the savagery of love and human selfishness on display!

Fennell’s version is a watered-down retelling

The film’s writer-director has a bad reputation among film enthusiasts online: Her movies, like Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, are ridiculously stylish, but some say they fumble their moral and thematic messaging, swerving commentary about gender and class in favor of shock value and vibes.

Here, Fennell was given a massive budget to adapt the beloved book she, and so many other emotional, verbose women across many generations, have a deep personal connection to. The scare quotes in the official title Wuthering Heights, as seen in the movie poster, are intended to remind you that this is just one woman’s take on the story — as if she’s saying, very forthrightly, “Please don’t be mad at me, this is just my take.”

Critics nevertheless lambasted the movie for being too dumb. Vulture’s Alison Willmore complimented its “smooth-brained sensuality,” adding that “Fennell surveys Brontë’s saga of doomed passion, obsession, and multigenerational resentment and sums it up as the story of two incredibly messy bitches who can’t stay away from one another.” Slate’s Dana Stevens calls it “gorgeous, throbbing, and proudly idiotic.” Both note that Fennell’s adaptation rejects the underlying story of class and race relations to focus on the tension between the two very hot leads. To which I say, yes, of course it does!

Most of the book — including its depiction of incest, attempted child murder, animal abuse and necrophilia — is not in the movie. It zeroes in on one relationship, eliminating many characters and dropping the second generation of torture that Heathcliff and Catherine inflict on one another, in life and beyond. Without that layer of nuance, what’s left is basically fan fiction.

There’s an argument that Fennell gleaned from the book what she could handle as a storyteller who is white and wealthy, and this is merely that story. Her take has walls made of flesh and comically large strawberries. By Vulture’s count, we have 31 other adaptations to choose from. Why get so exercised by this one?

Discussing the differences between the movie and the book, nonetheless, is a great pastime that encourages reading and media literacy, and has even gotten new people to pick up the novel and fall in love with it. I count that as an overall win.

It’s too horny (or horny in the wrong way)

Wuthering Heights is sexy. There’s a lot of intercourse injected into the movie that was never in the book, complimented by constant innuendo — a hanging that sounds awfully sexual, foods that look like body parts and goo everywhere. There’s been a lot of disdain for the people who find that hot. At the same time, some critics argue it doesn’t go far enough. Despite all the juxtapositions of animal slaughter with kinky sex that probably hadn’t entered Victorian consciousness yet, the Ringer’s Adam Nayman writes that Fennell doesn’t quite reach the edgelord status she so wants, instead becoming a “naughty, frictionless spectacle.”

Perhaps the most baffling criticism I’ve seen online of the film is that Wuthering Heights, originally a book written by a young unmarried woman and read by high schoolers everywhere, is “an erotic film made for virgins.” Well, yes!

We know culture has become increasingly sex negative in recent years. To people online, Wuthering Heights is somehow too much of a sexual fantasy and not sexy enough.

Look, I think it’s perfectly valid to call a movie stupid or dislike its execution, but the hate has escalated to such a point that the people who were moved by it are worried that they’re dumb. I think it’s beautiful that some people can ignore Charli xcx’s auto-tuned score howling over the moors in a particularly emotional scene. It’s valid that some people can’t. It’s not a moral failing to fall on the less pretentious side.

The mental calisthenics and good-natured amusement of arguing about media become a lot less productive when it results in shaming people for having a bit of fun at the theater. Let’s hash out our differences on the internet in a civilized way and leave the savagery to Heathcliff and Catherine.