“Sinners, buy a sinner!” echoes through the street market, amidst the restless murmur of people who have just witnessed something everyone is keeping secret, something everyone recognizes, but no one dares to name.

What is one of the topics teenagers think about, imagine, and dream about most?

What is the power of readers when they read a work of fiction?

The film Wuthering Heights, by Emerald Fennell (2026), inspired by Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, stages this dual dimension of questions that carry something subterranean and primal, and reaffirms the miracle of literature: creating a unique world within each reader, in accordance with their age, their time, their place, their experience, and their expectations. Each reading is unique because each reader is unique, and because each life reads from its own wounds and its own desires.

The most valuable aspect of this film lies in how Emerald Fennell sheds light on these two questions. She has always said that in her “Wuthering Heights”—yes, with the quotation marks imposed by the director—she wanted to do something that would make her relive how she felt when she first read the novel at age 14: “Which means it’s an emotional response to something. Primal, sexual”. The director felt something “deep, singular. It’s so sexy. It moved me deeply. (…) It’s difficult, it’s complicated, it’s simply unlike any other. (…) It’s devastating”, she explained to the BBC. With this perspective, Fennell expands on Emily Brontë’s novel.

And that impact, preserved in amber, is what her film attempts to bring back to life. She does so through a bold visual narrative, where each image aspires to become a story in itself. The memory of her first reading—where the tensions of desire and sex surface in that passionate love story starring the irresistible Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi)—materializes in an eclectic universe that blends eras and styles, from the classical to the kitsch to the pop, as if memory and the present coexisted on the same plane.

Therein lies the key to the film: in the revelation of the origin of his inspiration, in that first reading at an age when everything is experienced with absolute intensity, and in the world that reading unconsciously created within her, a world more felt than understood. Adolescence is the realm of intensity, and Emily Brontë’s work belongs to that same realm. If Fennell had read the tragic story of Catherine and Heathcliff for the first time at age 30, the effect would have been different. And at 66, different again. As with any book. That is the power and the magic of fiction.

The Unorthodox Lineage

Emerald Fennell’s honesty and originality lie in situating her film in that intimate territory that opens up after reading, that invisible space where the reader finishes writing the book they have read. Because what truly matters here is the reader’s perspective. Every author knows that, once published, their book ceases to belong to them and begins to live in others. And sometimes, that new life illuminates hidden areas that even the author themselves never suspected. In this case, erotic charge, desire, sex, and the revelation of the power games that love and its accomplices secretly wield emerge, like a force that acts in the shadows before becoming visible.

Every adaptation belongs to another universe and responds to different narrative codes. It doesn’t have to be faithful to the literal meaning of the original work. Sometimes, infidelity is the deepest form of fidelity to the spirit.

This is the path chosen by Emerald Fennell in her Wuthering Heights. His approach falls within the tradition of unorthodox adaptations of the Gothic classic, such as those by Luis Buñuel with Abismos de pasión (1953), Jacques Rivette with Hurlevent (1985), or Yoshishige Yoshida with Onimaru (1988): films as free as they are revealing, as personal as the more canonical versions by William Wyler (1939) or Peter Kosminsky (1992).

More than thirty film and television adaptations have attempted to capture the spell of Emily Brontë’s novel. It belongs to the lineage of those magnetic works that cinema never ceases to question, revisit, and reinvent, like Romeo and Juliet (whose story, precisely, is told by Isabella, Catherine’s sister-in-law, whom Heathcliff will marry as revenge), Macbeth or Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy; The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas; Les Misérables by Victor Hugo; or Dracula by Bram Stoker. To these we should add the inexhaustible biblical imagination and the universe of Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, whose capacity for regeneration seems to know no bounds.

The Secret of Emerald Fennell

Emerald Fennell is an actress who has worked, for example, on Joe Wright’s unorthodox version of Anna Karenina (2012). She is also a screenwriter and director of some incisive recent films, such as the thriller Promising Young Woman (2020), which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the dark comedy thriller Saltburn (2023), where she explores the links between desire, class, and power. Her approach to Wuthering Heights confirms her interest in ambiguous moral territories and the hidden impulses that govern human behavior.

This adaptation focuses on the first part of the novel, on the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, and leaves out the story of the next generation, the one that suffers the consequences of the original wound. Fennell takes liberties, eliminating characters and altering aspects of the plot to concentrate on the protagonists’ discovery of desire, attraction, and sexual exploration. The critiques of class, racial, and relational inequalities are presented in a different way.

The director confirms that she is not seeking a literal interpretation of the work, but rather to bring to the surface its underlying tensions, uniting her memories of reading it with contemporary sensibilities, from the physical to the emotional, from classical narrative to the more audiovisual and avant-garde world that resonates with new generations. The art direction, costume design, cinematography, and soundtrack complete and complement the director’s vision. They are not merely decorative or purely aesthetic; they are integral to the story and act as narrators.

And it is here that we should return to the initial question: what do teenagers think about, imagine, and dream about?

There are many themes that, at their core, are one and the same: awakening. Discovery. Exploration. Bewilderment. Confusion in the face of desire, seduction, passion, love, eroticism, and sex. Teenagers live in the crucible of emotions, where everything burns simultaneously. Nothing is calm. Feelings are experienced intensely. There are no middle grounds. Boundaries are blurred because the self is still being constructed.

It is there that passion, eroticism, and obsession reach their greatest intensity. It is the tragedy of love in its most genuine and fragile state, on the border where happiness and pain, paradise and hell, converge, where loving and destroying oneself sometimes seem like the same thing.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in essence, is the birth of these emotions in their most primal, free, and untamed form. A torrent that sweeps its protagonists away without them fully understanding what is happening to them. Feelings that breathe life, energy, freedom, playfulness, and fire.

A product of its time and echoing other films

The novel, Emily Brontë’s only one, captures something that also resides in Greek myths, where the gods behave like adolescents dominated by untamed impulses and passions, where even cruelty and pain reign. The writer must have known these stories or, at least, breathed their same symbolic atmosphere. Or perhaps she was familiar with Plato’s Phaedrus, where the charioteer of the winged chariot tries to control the horses of desire and reason. But in adolescence, almost always, the dark horse runs faster.

Emerald Fennell read the novel at 14, at that transitional moment when the world begins to reveal its depths. And that impact, preserved in amber, is what her film attempts to bring back to life.

Because everyone is a product of their time. Emerald Fennell was born in 1985 and grew up in the 1990s. She lived through the rebirth of coexistence and hybridization of all styles, where boundaries blur and feelings begin to surface without prejudice. A child of the MTV era, the birth of the internet, grunge, pop, techno, the Oasis vs. Blur rivalry, Radiohead, Madonna—a cultural universe where emotions began to be expressed without shame. She surely saw the tumultuous love of Edward Scissorhands; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where Francis Ford Coppola also brings to the surface the sexual tension between the protagonists; Baz Luhrmann’s groundbreaking Romeo + Juliet; Pulp Fiction, Titanic… Series like Beverly Hills, 90210 or Melrose Place. All of this contributed to shaping her sensibility.

That collection of images, sounds, and emotions forms part of the perspective with which she read the novel and, now, with which she reinterprets it, demonstrating that all creation is also a secret autobiography.

And perhaps, guilt, sin. It is no coincidence that one of the film’s opening lines, when people disperse in the square after the hanging of a man who, upon dying, reflexively experiences an erection, and everyone stares at him with a mixture of astonishment, lust, and knowing smiles, is followed by a voice rising in the street market:

“Sinners, buy a sinner!”

Catherine’s home is crumbling. Decay reigns all around her. But she and Heathcliff do not sink, because they are sustained by desire, passion, and repressed love, that invisible force capable of supporting what the world is tearing down. The film inhabits that territory where the novel, the memory of reading it, dream, and nightmare converge. Explore the labyrinths of desire, the power struggles, and the cruelty born of wounded love, when love ceases to be a refuge and becomes a wound. A relationship in which the charioteer has lost control and passion devours everything. As when Heathcliff tells Catherine on two occasions:

Kiss me! Let us burn in hell!

We are lost!

Love is always adolescent

Catherine and Heathcliff are, from childhood, two souls who believe themselves to be one. And at that age, love is experienced as absolute. Everything else is insignificant.

That is the emotional truth that Fennell captures. Not the literalness of the novel, but the intensity of its impact, the mark it leaves on the reader.

Many will consider this adaptation provocative. But that provocation is nothing more than the honest expression of an age in which everything is discovered for the first time, when reading was also discovering who we were.

Because every book has its own life and is reborn differently in each reader.

This Wuthering Heights doesn’t attempt to reproduce the novel, but rather to recapture the emotion of that first encounter. To liberate adolescent memories and merge them with the sensibilities of another era. It will appeal more to young people than to adults, who don’t compare the film to the novel because they understand and believe they are different languages.

An author doesn’t judge their creations; they create them and endow them with specific characteristics that serve to tell a story in a world they create around them, a world that readers then interpret and give life to as they wish.

The need to love and be loved remains intact. The vertigo of desire. The abyssal feeling of helplessness in the face of unrequited love that rots all that is beautiful. The fragility of everything that seems eternal.

This film is, at its core, an invitation to return to the unrepeatable moment when a book first transformed us.

Emerald Fennell seems to be saying that love has taken so many turns, rebelled so many times, and explored so many paths since its inception, and yet it remains at the same starting point: that of eternal aspiration. Because genuine love, at any age, is always adolescent.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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