By O’Connor Daniel | Reporter
It’s one thing to reinterpret a classic. It’s another to strip it of its moral core, fill it with empty provocation and brand it as “visionary cinema.” What we’re witnessing in today’s adaptations of literary masterpieces isn’t reimagination — it’s exploitation. The latest victim is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Set for release on Feb. 13, 2026, the new film stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and has already stirred uproar online. One user on X wrote, “Emily Brontë is rising from her grave as we speak because why did they turn ‘Wuthering Heights’ into Fifty Shades of Heathcliff and Cathy?” That reaction may sound flippant, but the concern behind it is deeply valid.
Brontë’s singular novel is not, and never was, a love story in the modern, marketable sense. It is a psychological exploration of obsession, revenge and the cruelty that reverberates across generations. Yet the trailer for this adaptation turned a thoughtful and complex storyline into something of a plate of mundanity with a side of artsy. In one sequence, a romantic moment between Cathy and Heathcliff is intercut with an image of a dead fish’s mouth. In another, they stagger through the moors like models in a perfume ad — all intensity, no substance.
The visual choices aren’t merely odd. They’re grotesque, and not in the hauntingly Gothic sense Brontë intended. While one recent article in The Swarthmore Phoenix defends the trailer’s “horrifically gothic” approach, what’s missing is any meaningful engagement with the text’s actual spirit. This isn’t depth. It’s a distortion.
This seems to be a growing trend, particularly from certain directors who mistake depravity for depth. The filmmaker in question, Emerald Fennell, previously known for “Saltburn,” specializes in shock value. His content is so nakedly debased that its setting in a classic, timeless world feels not artistic, but ironic.
The very works these films borrow from were written to instruct, to show us how to be better, how to wrestle with human weakness and attempt to rise above it. Think of the moral weight behind Charles Dickens’ novels, or even the quiet devastation of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” where director Joe Wright handled adult themes with restraint and gravity, not absurd perversion. This kind of cinematic recklessness isn’t new, but it seems to be growing more common.
Filmmakers like Fennell mistake aesthetic depravity for narrative boldness. The setting may be classic, but the tone is all modern shock-value, with none of the soul. As The Cornell Daily Sun put it: “Today, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is read in high schools, universities and in the comfort of homes, regarded as one of the best books in history… One year after its publication, [Brontë] died from tuberculosis. And, in a way, I am glad she never lived to see the trailer for Warner Bros. Pictures’ adaptation of her beloved work.”
Though Brontë did seek to challenge the norms of Victorian fiction, she didn’t write in a protective manner. She wrote with fire, not to glamorize moral ruin, but to portray its cost. The characters’ pain, rage and longing were never glorified. And, no, Catherine and Heathcliff do not engage in physical intimacy in the book. Their relationship is fueled by spiritual obsession, not sensual indulgence. Marriage mattered. Boundaries existed. And Brontë’s work respected them, even as it bent others.
Hollywood’s approach today often takes the opposite path. What’s at stake is more than literary faithfulness. The classics are not sacred because they are old. They are sacred because they still speak. They confront human brokenness, challenge cultural decay and uphold moral inquiry. “A Tale of Two Cities” teaches about sacrifice. “Jane Eyre” wrestles with integrity. Even “Wuthering Heights,” bleak as it is, warns us about what happens when love is twisted into control.
The classics are not sacred because they are old — they are sacred because they still speak and instruct us in the present. When we turn them into a canvas for stylized sin without substance, we don’t “modernize” them; we mock them. And worse, we lose what made them worth remembering in the first place.
