By Ahaqir Ishaq
Emerald Fennell’s 2026 Wuthering Heights keeps Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff at its center, but significantly changes the story surrounding them. The film adds a sexual affair, removes important characters, reshapes Nelly Dean’s involvement and ends long before Emily Brontë’s novel does.
Starring Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the film opened in U.S. theaters on February 13, 2026. The official Warner Bros. website now lists it as available on digital and 4K Ultra HD.
The biggest difference is structural: Catherine’s death ends the movie, but the novel continues into another generation. That decision changes what the audience sees of Heathcliff, and what the story ultimately says about love, cruelty and recovery.
Spoiler warning: Major spoilers for the 2026 film and the entire novel follow.
Wuthering Heights Book vs. Movie: The Biggest Changes
| Element | Emily Brontë’s novel | Emerald Fennell’s 2026 movie |
|---|---|---|
| Story’s scope | Two generations and the consequences of Heathcliff’s revenge | Concentrates on Catherine and Heathcliff |
| Catherine and Heathcliff | No depicted ongoing sexual affair | Have an explicit affair after her marriage |
| Hindley Earnshaw | Catherine’s brother and Heathcliff’s tormentor | Removed; Mr. Earnshaw takes on abusive traits |
| Nelly Dean | A participant whose narration shapes the story | More directly engineers misunderstandings |
| Isabella | Edgar’s sister, who escapes an abusive marriage | Edgar’s ward, who knowingly enters a degrading relationship |
| Catherine’s pregnancy | Her daughter survives | The baby dies; Catherine develops sepsis |
| Ending | Continues through Heathcliff’s death and the younger generation’s reconciliation | Ends after Catherine’s death |
1. Fennell Adapts Her Experience of the Book
Fennell has been open about the film’s personal approach. In her interview with W magazine, she explained that the quotation marks in the movie’s title signal an interpretation of a small part of a much larger novel.
That helps explain the heightened costumes, surreal interiors and contemporary musical sensibility. The film builds a world around emotional intensity rather than consistently reproducing the historical setting.
Brontë also makes landscape and houses reflect human conflict. Fennell expands that relationship into the production design itself, giving the characters’ desires a more visibly artificial, dreamlike environment.
2. Catherine and Heathcliff Have a Sexual Affair
The film turns Catherine and Heathcliff’s connection into an explicit affair after she marries Edgar Linton. As TheWrap’s comparison explains, their physical encounters are a major addition.
The novel does not depict an ongoing sexual affair between them. Its emotional intimacy is overwhelming, but readers should distinguish what Brontë writes from what an adaptation imagines.
This changes the kind of frustration driving their relationship. In the book, Catherine’s identification with Heathcliff exceeds ordinary romantic attachment, yet they never build a shared life. The film gives them a physical relationship while preserving the barriers that prevent them from staying together.
3. Hindley Disappears, and Mr. Earnshaw Becomes More Abusive
Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine’s brother, is absent from the film. In the novel, his jealousy of Heathcliff becomes brutal domination after their father dies: he deprives Heathcliff of education and reduces him to a servant’s position.
The movie transfers significant cruelty and self-destructive behavior to Mr. Earnshaw. Entertainment Weekly details how the father’s expanded role replaces part of Hindley’s function.
This simplifies the household, but it also removes a crucial pattern. Brontë later has Heathcliff mistreat Hindley’s son, Hareton, repeating the deprivation he experienced himself. Without Hindley and Hareton, that reversal disappears.
4. Nelly’s Interference Becomes More Direct
Hong Chau’s Nelly plays a more openly manipulative role. The film has her engineer the circumstances in which Heathcliff overhears Catherine discussing marriage, and later withhold his letters during Catherine’s illness. Radio Times examines this stronger antagonistic interpretation.
The book’s Nelly also interferes, judges and withholds information. She should not be treated as an impartial observer. However, her storytelling leaves readers to assess how far her decisions shape the tragedy.
Fennell complicates the idea that Nelly is simply a villain. In a National Board of Review Q&A, she described Nelly as someone attempting to control a disastrous situation, while acknowledging the character’s capacity for deliberate cruelty.
5. Isabella’s Relationship With Heathcliff Is Rewritten
Alison Oliver’s Isabella is Edgar’s ward rather than his sister. The movie also has her knowingly accept Heathcliff’s lack of love and enter a sexual relationship involving submission and humiliation.
The distinction matters. In the novel, Isabella discovers that the man she romanticized is cruel and dangerous. She escapes him and raises their son, Linton, away from Wuthering Heights. Vanity Fair’s comparison discusses the film’s changed emphasis on consent.
My reading of this change is that it softens an important part of Heathcliff’s characterization. Brontë uses Isabella’s experience to expose the danger of confusing a brooding outsider with a romantic hero. The movie gives that relationship a substantially different meaning.
6. Heathcliff’s Casting Changes the Story’s Racial Dimension
Brontë repeatedly describes Heathcliff through racialized language, although she never establishes his ancestry. The text supports discussion of his perceived difference without settling a definitive ethnic identity.
Casting the white actor Jacob Elordi changes how that difference appears on screen. TheWrap also addresses this casting choice.
The interpretive consequence is significant: class can remain visible while racial exclusion becomes less apparent. In the novel, other characters’ descriptions of Heathcliff help show how they mark him as someone who does not belong.
7. Catherine’s Death Is Different and So Is the Ending
In the movie, Catherine loses her baby and dies from sepsis. Heathcliff reaches her after her death. The novel gives them a devastating final meeting while she is alive, and Catherine dies after giving birth to a surviving daughter.
The film closes on Heathcliff’s grief. Brontë follows its consequences for years.
The younger Catherine, Hareton Earnshaw and Linton Heathcliff become central to the remaining story. Heathcliff manipulates their lives and inheritance, turning his own suffering into suffering for others. Eventually, the younger Catherine and Hareton develop a relationship that offers a way out of that cycle.
Readers can check the full narrative in Brontë’s novel on Project Gutenberg. Its ending includes Heathcliff’s death, the younger couple’s planned marriage and lingering uncertainty about the dead lovers’ presence.
For me, the loss of the second generation is the adaptation’s most consequential decision. The book asks what happens when wounded people pass their cruelty onward—and whether anyone can live differently. Ending with Catherine leaves that question largely unexplored.
Is the 2026 Wuthering Heights Movie Faithful to the Book?
It preserves the central attachment, the social barriers and the destructive emotional intensity, but substantially rewrites the plot and scope.
Fennell explained in her conversation with Baz Luhrmann for Interview that she wanted the lovers to express their love and made deliberate decisions to condense the cast.
The result is a personal interpretation built around Catherine and Heathcliff. Reading the novel afterward reveals a broader story: their tragedy becomes the starting point for an examination of inherited cruelty, power and the possibility of repair.
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