Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is here – and let’s just say, it’s divisive. While plenty of girlies are grabbing their phones, turning on the flash and filming their mascara-stained faces as the credits roll, others are leaving the cinema with nothing more than a confused, slightly outraged guffaw. At least this was my experience.
Fennell had warned us all: “The thing for me is that you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book,” she told Fandango. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”
Whatever version of Wuthering Heights you crave, there’s plenty to choose from.
How many Wuthering Heights adaptations are there?
Brontë’s novel has been given the screen treatment dozens of times, including a Bollywood musical version, a 1988 Japanese rendition and a 2003 modernised teen musical take.
Where to watch other versions of Wuthering Heights
Film 4
Kaya Scodelario and James Howson, 2011
Andrea Arnold’s gritty, understated retelling is the first and, so far, only adaptation to cast Heathcliff as a person of colour, with James Howson taking on the role. As such, it’s the only adaptation to engage with the novel’s central theme of racial prejudice and discrimination. This adaptation is also not entirely faithful – but it does engage with the novel, particularly when it comes to its representation of the barren, wild, rugged moors upon which Cathy and Heathcliff develop their tortured, tragic mutual obsession. Arnold brings a clarity to the doomed love and the unstoppable, violent revenge plot it inspires in stripped-back cinematic fashion.
The 2011 film is available to stream on Mubi, Channel 4 and Disney+.
Copyright © ©ITV / Everett Collection
Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, 2009
An ITV two-parter, the 2009 version sees a brooding Tom Hardy take on the Byronic hero, while his IRL wife Charlotte Riley brings an entitled cruelty to Cathy. Naturally, their chemistry sizzles. Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire also appears as unreliable narrator Nelly. The length of this adaptation allows us to get a little deeper into the source material, and it ends up being one of the most faithful retellings around – in a rare move, it also attempts to acquaint viewers with the second generation and the generational trauma theme that is so vital to Brontë’s work.