Wuthering Heights (2026) Review: Jacob Elordi Drives It Home
A silly first act gives way to something genuinely tragic.
The first act was silly and typical. I hated it. I was ready to rate this film a 2.5/5 and call it a day. But something changed. The second act gets more interesting. The oddness. The deviousness. And by the third act, it was riveting. I ended up at 3.5 by the end.
A lot of that comes down to Jacob Elordi. I started with “boo, you were better in Frankenstein as a monster” and ended at “woah bro, this is your best performance yet.” That arc is real. He became a bro. He came into this role fresh off del Toro’s Frankenstein, and whatever he learned there about playing a dark, physically threatening presence, he brings all of it into Heathcliff, especially as the film goes on. Some people didn’t like that, especially basing from the source material, but as I will evidently show in this review, I never read or have any incling about the source material.
Emerald Fennell directs this as a loose reinterpretation of the Brontë novel, and the approach is deliberately contemporary. The soundtrack is Charli XCX, which explains the 2000s pop feel sitting underneath a period drama. It felt to me like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. It was interesting, but it didn’t work for me (maybe because I’m over 40) especially in that first act where the silliness and the anachronistic sound hit at the same time.
The sexual innuendo throughout is actually actually pretty funny. The film is clearly going for something provocative, which makes it oddly notable that there’s no nudity, especially coming from the director of Saltburn. Fennell leans into the weird and the suggestive, and some of it lands as dark comedy more than anything else.
On casting: everybody is talking about it, and the ethnicities question is one I’d give them a pass on. They played around with it across several characters, and there’s an argument to be made for what they were doing. The bigger issue is Margot Robbie as a teenager. It never really registered. She does fine work, but the early sections where she’s supposed to be young, wild, and naive just didn’t land the same way.
But by the end, I had the feels, my wife had tears. We felt for these characters. The tragedy made the whole story work. I understand there’s supposed to be a second generation in the book, but ending where this film ends makes sense. It earns its gut punch.
3.5/5
Find my full film diary on Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/migmol